Hacker News Reader

Having talked to a bunch of very experienced LISPers recently (including Richard Gabriel) about this very topic, it appears to be the case that most people go wild with macros for a little while, but this passes and then you write fairly straightforward code.

There is no single answer for that. Some code from experienced Lisp developers uses a lot of macros. Others don't like that style. It also depends on what you are writing.

I've written CL macros. I've noticed that for me, the probability of long-term use seems proportional to the size of a macro's implementation. The more work a macro does, the less likely I'm to revert to "straightforward code".

Most of the macros you'll need are already part of clojure core, thankfully

Well, those feature are needed, but good people already made use of them. The "go" macro from core.async is a good example.

can be said about C++ (or any language). But he (the author) said it much better.

(sorry YOU said it much better.. )