[BrendanEich]

Reading the macros first helps. They must be defined at top of program or module, if I recall sweetjs.org's design correctly, for the staged hygienic expansion to work well.

Aside from that, you're right. But JS has higher order functions and objects with ad-hoc methods, so it can be used according to many paradigms, which can make it hard for a reader unfamiliar with the dominant paradigm in code at hand.

This is not a deal-killer for macros, although with sweet.js as the prototyping tool, your assertion about "This is the job" is satisfied. Sweet.js works with node to do AOT macro expansion at present. There's effort to integrate it in the browser too, but this will be easier with ES6 module loaders (not yet prototyped in SpiderMonkey or V8).

[saebekassebil]

Of course, as in every aspect of understanding, here for source code, it is important first to learn the context, here the macro definitions. My concern is that this will impose more than just a paradigm - it will impose new syntax which could effectively completely ruin the readability of JavaScript source.

The macro syntax is definitely not simple, and it could possibly get really complex for more elaborate syntactic definitions, thus rendering the source much less readable. Is the overall benefits of introducing macros to JavaScript really worth the costs of readability? And does the effort to integrate macros into the browser mean that it'll be possible to evaluate macros "runtime"?

[disnet]

> The macro syntax is definitely not simple, and it could possibly get really complex for more elaborate syntactic definitions, thus rendering the source much less readable.

True, but the same can be said of any API. Reading the definitions can help but for both complex macros and complex APIs built today out of just functions and objects you need to document your abstractions. Macros don't change this, they just give you another abstraction axis (syntactic) to work with.

As with most things it just depends on how you use it. Sure you can abuse macros to make tons of crazy, undocumented, hard to understand syntactic extensions that destroy readability. But you can already do that today. Used wisely macros can increase readability, used poorly they can decrease it.

> And does the effort to integrate macros into the browser mean that it'll be possible to evaluate macros "runtime"?

Not sure what you mean here. By definition macros are expanded at compile time (well, parse time really). The browser doesn't change this.

[saebekassebil]

I meant compile time of course, thank you for your clarifications. I'm eager to see how this turn out.