[mr_luc]

I agree that there aren't a ton of convincing examples mentioned that aren't relevant to people who already agree w/the value of lisp-style macros -- but if you're interested I used the example of erlang when responding to a comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343140

FWIW I do actually agree w/pg about macros; I use them day-to-day for more mundane things than his impressive fully-bottom-up approach to programming. But each time I do use them, I feel like "thank heavens I don't have to reach for some weird external codegen tool to do this".

[sanderjd]

See I don't really feel that way about macros. To me, codegen is codegen, useful for a bunch of stuff but not really anything special, and whether or not it is homoiconic doesn't seem like the fundamental question to me.

Don't get me wrong, I think homoiconicity and macros are really neat, I can get behind the aesthetic appreciation of different programming languages and syntaxes for doing different things. But people seem to want to convince me that there is some mystical mind expanding power to it, rather than just aesthetic nicety, and that's what I find unconvincing.