Lisp has several time phases that may or may not interleave, so yeah it can be confusing.. but keeping things simple and mostly only thinking about macros at co

Lisp has several time phases that may or may not interleave, so yeah it can be confusing.. but keeping things simple and mostly only thinking about macros at compile time or read time can still go a long way. Ultimately an important and practical high level effect is macros let you create new syntax, not just computation at compile time to save some function calls at runtime. Want infix math? You can have infix math: https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix https://github.com/rigetticomputing/cmu-infix Going crazy with lexical nesting (similar to callback hell, but imagine each callback needs to close over the environment it's called from, not just defined in)? A one-liner might help: https://fare.livejournal.com/189741.html https://fare.livejournal.com/189741.html Want powerful looping constructs, powerful OOP, pattern matching, etc? Of course you can stick with simple macros that are little more than function wrappers, but you can do a lot more.