[sreque]

I want to emphasize your post with even more information. I believe the person implementing macros is actually a first-year PhD student at EPFL and he decided to do his first major project on porting a Nemerle-like macro system to Scala (http://www.scala-lang.org/node/10978). Of course he isn't going to do a project on making Scala's documentation as rock solid as PHP's!

Also, as for why macros are being put in the language: this is what Martin Odersky had to say on the subject (see http://www.scala-lang.org/node/12494):

"The intention of macros, and of Scala's language design in general, is to simplify things. We have already managed to replace code lifting by macros, and hopefully other features will follow.... Optimizations such as on Range.foreach are another use case. I believe that in the long run macros can be a simplifying factor."

Macros therefore can actually satisfy at least one of the complaints the Yammer CEO made about the language: slow foreach loops, along with simplifying the language in general.

[bkudria]

Minor correction: Coda isn't our CEO.