I used to think the same thing.. but then I read http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented-free-monads.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2012

I used to think the same thing.. but then I read http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented-free-monads.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented... and my jaw dropped. This is a formal way to do homoiconicity, and frankly much better than codewalkers and CPS-conversions and similar tricks. I now think that everything you can do with macros in CL, you can do in Haskell too and it will be cleaner. Another good example are lens and traversals, they are generalizations of generic references such that CL can only envy. Someone should really rewrite On Lisp and Paradigms of AI in Haskell.. (and also Design Patterns from GoF) I think it would prove this point.