[moron4hire]

It's not that there is anything particularly special about what you can do in Lisp than what you can do in, say, C#. It's that Lisp provides facilities for metaprogramming that most other languages lack. Most other languages make metaprogramming hard enough, or require it all be done at runtime, that it is very discouraging against the concept in general. Lisp creates a culture around metaprogramming that fundamentally changes how you approach programming forever after.

You stop writing programs. You start writing programs that write programs. It's a lever that multiplies the power of the programmer. That can be both good and bad. For a hacker coding in earnest on her own, it can be extremely good.

Yes, if you are the type of beginner or intermediate programmer that still struggles to just write programs, advanced metaprogramming in any language is not for you. If you're an intermediate programmer looking to become an expert programmer, learn Lisp, where metaprogramming is easy, and take the lessons on to whatever other languages you eventually end up using.

That's what people mean.