I suspect that is just a matter of taste. I find source->source transformations pretty darn useful. You end up writing boilerplate code in all languages. Being

I suspect that is just a matter of taste. I find source->source transformations pretty darn useful. You end up writing boilerplate code in all languages. Being able to just abstract that away is comfortable, and I don't really see the problem (together with what I suspect is the vast majority of lispers). You can of course provide libraries that "extend" the language, but sometimes you will never be able to lose the feeling of it being bolted on, because the semantics of the la guage doesn't lend itself to that certain way of doing it. Lisp macros solve that, at least for me. We use them like regular procedures and as long as you keep the simple rule that you sbouldnt make a macro of something you want to compose with procedures, there really isnt much that gets in the way of understanding a program, because most of the time whether something is a macro or not does not matter.