[stephen]

Where I work (i.e. write code for money, to satisfy Ted Nyman's requirement that my opinion matter), our reaction was exactly the opposite--we're very much looking forward to having macros in Scala.

If this was a more esoteric language feature, I'd be inclined to agree, but macros (if done well), I think will be a huge boon to the language.

I do all sorts of hackery in Java now (external code generation, heavily using annotation processing tools (APTs) which are a very, very limited form for language-based code generation) to do semi-metaprogramming stuff and can't wait to do the real thing.

(And do it well, e.g. not to make things "even more cryptic" just for the fun of it, but to solve real problems.)