This was kind of my original point though. If you do treat them as compile time functions i.e. for a bit of light code gen then they can be super useful. But t

This was kind of my original point though. If you do treat them as compile time functions i.e. for a bit of light code gen then they can be super useful. But that's often not the case. In fact, OO is a nice example. It's probably less true now that OO seems to be a bit out of fashion, but the number of crappy, poorly documented OO systems I've seen in Lisps over the years is staggering. It's not really a criticism of macros so much as an observation. It's also possible that the type of developer who is attracted to adding a bijou OO system into their application is the type of developer that is attracted to Lisps. It may well be the case that adding a macro system to JS wouldn't have the same attraction so wouldn't have the same downside.