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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me the Clojure community internalized the lesson of not writing macros unless it's really necessary more than other Lisps did.

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So does the community of every other dialect (Common Lisp, at least). Write a function if you don't have to write a macro, and maybe declaim the function to be inlined.

The "Lisp Curse" is a ridiculous and tired myth that can only be invented by people who have looked at the language for 5 seconds and went straight to finding an excuse to not learn it.

Is it? I saw macros and went mad with power. I wrote a macro that could have been a function today.

But seriously, I think Clojure has a particularly strong tradition of writing clean, readable code.

Clojure is actually an interesting case here, because it is hosted. So, you can write a Clojurescript macro that runs at compile time on the JVM, but emits code that runs at runtime in Javascript, e.g. instead of blindly loading and executing some JS lib code, your macro can first parse it, analyze it, and conditionally emit Cljs that changes the runtime behavior.

Use-cases for code that writes code across a host boundary are rare, yet enormously useful and really difficult to achieve without homoiconic nature of the language.

Hyperfiddle/Electric is a nice project that effectively utilizes the idea.

I believe the real issue is that Scheme, which was (through university) often the first and last contact of people with Lisp family languages, has greatly exaggerated case of "everyone reinventing the wheel", and that's before you get into educational reasons that led to people seeing very limited view of Scheme

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