> Also, don't confuse readability with understanding. Yes, DSLs are typically easier to read, but only after you come to understand the primitives of the langua

> Also, don't confuse readability with understanding. Yes, DSLs are typically easier to read, but only after you come to understand the primitives of the language. This is also true of functions. Without reading the body, you don't know if it's just going to return the sum of the two integers you passed to it, or if it's going to change some global variable, launch the missiles, and then return a random int. Yes, macros are more powerful, and therefore you need to be more careful with them. But they are still much better than what ends up being used instead. With languages that don't have macros, you end up with complex frameworks that use runtime reflection, or code generators that run as part of the build system (which end up being an ad-hoc, messy macro system). Or, some horrible solution where you embed a DSL by interpreting trees of objects, which effectively represent an AST. In this case, the embedded language doesn't follow the language rules, but it seems like it does, because you're looking at the implementation of the interpreter, instead of at the syntax of the embedded language.