Absolutely. However, I will note that, while Haskell makes partial application very easy, there's also nothing Haskell-specific about it: you can write curried

Absolutely. However, I will note that, while Haskell makes partial application very easy, there's also nothing Haskell-specific about it: you can write curried functions in many languages, possibly by using helper functions or just manually transforming your code: def tag(tag): def render(*body): return '<{tag}>{body}</{tag}>'.format( tag=tag, body=''.join(body)) return render html = tag('html') body = tag('body') h1 = tag('h1') p = tag('p') I also should note that, while the macros in this case could be obviated by approaching the problem slightly differently, I don't think that's true of Lisp macros in general. I don't want to be be too harsh to this particular blog post—coming up with a two-or-three line motivating example that's accessible to a general audience without being contrived is very hard! But one consequence of the slightly-contrived nature of the example in this post is that it's very easy to come up with non-macro ways of solving the same problem, as demonstrated above.