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At the same time the Lisp community is one of the fiercest in supporting the idea that nothing that can be a function should be a macro. Metaprogramming just because it is clever is more abhorred in the Lisp community than any other I've seen.

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Of course! Macros are distinctly less powerful than functions for one reason: they are not first class values at runtime and thus cannot be passed to higher-order functions.

This is solved by using an operative lisp - fexprs (or 'vau'/'$vau' in kernel and wat) are non-applicative combiners that execute at runtime, so you can have a first class combiner that chooses when/how/how many times to evaluate its arguments.

I've been having a lot of fun recently writing code in wat-pl (my perl port of Manuel Simonyi's wat-js interpreter)

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