You'll notice that in the first paragraph there, he says: > Python supports all of Lisp's essential features except macros, and you don't miss macros all that

You'll notice that in the first paragraph there, he says: > Python supports all of Lisp's essential features except macros, and you don't miss macros all that much because it does have eval, and operator overloading, and regular expression parsing, so some--but not all--of the use cases for macros are covered. Macros are a huge part of Lisp. Were they not, I don't think you'd see Lisp programmers defending the bare bones not-syntax so fiercely. For what it's worth, if you get good at a language, you start decomposing things into trees yourself when you're faced with some tricky code.