[Guthur]

I doubt he meant that it was not useful, rather that the usefulness might have been better served as a function of the compiler rather than some disconnected transformation tool.

Of course this thought process would eventual bring you down the road of macros systems such as those in Lisps, but that's going to be more difficult with a language lacking homoiconicity of code and data.

[zurn]

It's just unfairly easy in Lisp :)

There are macros in many non-homoiconinc languages (eg. Rust, Dylan), and there are add-ons for several of the languages lacking them (eg. SweetJS for Javascript, MacroPy for Python).