[packetlost]

Or you do:

``` (require (ast macroexpand))

(display (macroexpand my-macro arg1 arg2)) ``` and call it a day.

My argument isn't that the context-switch isn't there, it's that the context switch will happen regardless and having to think in 2 different languages is more mental overhead than is necessary. I do agree that homoiconicity is not a requirement, but it is nice to be able to do it all in one go and with no additional tooling, editor, etc.. In reality, a sizeable chunk of Lisp programmers are executing their code in a REPL continuously as part of their core development loop, there's no tooling (context) switch, no language context switch, and barely a macro vs application code context switch.

To illustrate, Rust macros are basically that. They have a substantially different syntax to normal Rust code that make it very difficult to quickly grok what is going on. It's a net negative IMO, not a positive.

[hzhou321]

> To illustrate, Rust macros are basically that. They have a substantially different syntax to normal Rust code that make it very difficult to quickly grok what is going on. It's a net negative IMO, not a positive.

Yeah, more like a syntax extension than macro. But I am saying that you need both. Some time you need powerful macro ability to extend the language. Sometime you just need templating to achieve the expressiveness. With LISP, I get it that you are programming all the time, never templating, right? But I guess you only appreciate templating when you use your macro system as a general purpose system . The benefit of general purpose macro systems is you only learn one tool for all languages, rather than re-learn the individual wheels. And when you judge a language, you no longer bothered by its syntactic warts because you can always fix the expressive part with your macro-layer.