[bluefox]

Remember JavaScript before "async"? Lots of boilerplate there. You had to wait until some committee decided to incorporate it into the language.

So "modern" languages without macros have such patches every now and then. Still, it's easy to find boilerplate in programs.

The reason is that a lot of boilerplate is specific to the program's domain, and you're left with cumbersome syntactic patterns and no tools to abstract them.

So yes, you need to learn how to write macros. But, assuming good taste, the simplicity is in their use, not their definition. It's a good tradeoff because macros are used much more often than they are defined.

By the way, the language introduced by a macro often allows arbitrary Lisp code to be mixed with it. The example did not demonstrate this, and that's why you had an easy time thinking up a non-macro alternative (which still has some unfortunate implications, like needing to interpret at runtime).