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by dustingetz 4717 days ago
The heavy emphasis of macros in Lisp may also be its greatest weakness. I see all sorts of Clojure code that uses macros where they needn't have, and it tremendously impedes my ability to use the code in ways the library author may not have expected. I love the way petehunt put it - metaprogramming is a last resort, you should feel bad when you use it, and language designers should include it but deemphasize it. (Scala and Haskell nail it I think; Clojure perhaps emphasizes macros a bit too much which harms the output of intermediate programmers. But, Clojure is not designed for intermediate programmers.)