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Ok, common-lisp newbie here.

Could you explain why Paul Graham's book "On Lisp" is wrong? Or misguided? Or misunderstood by newbies like me? 30 years of c++ with a lot of dealing with templates and I'm not feeling the mandatory function purity here.

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I don't think that is a reasonable request for a response to a comment post, but in my experience, many lisp macro advocates come from other procedural / OO languages and aren't well acquainted with other programming paradigms, so they don't generally know what the don't know about other styles, say functional programming, and how to solve problems using higher order functions, etc. instead of reaching for macros. Which is OK. Not everyone has to become a programming language dilettante.

Suppose I accede to every claim you make here. Where may I see the advantage in the long run, in any dimension? I'm willing to go with hearsay.

The word "dimension" is chosen to be so vague that you can surely do it. I would be easy to impress.

>Where may I see the advantage in the long run, in any dimension?

The advantage of what?

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