Clearly languages have common idioms. Lisp just has most of them implemented in terms of very basic idioms. Saying “macros are bad because you can overdo it” is

Clearly languages have common idioms. Lisp just has most of them implemented in terms of very basic idioms. Saying “macros are bad because you can overdo it” is a little silly. Sure: prefer plain old data manipulation over syntax manipulation. But when you actually want syntax manipulation, it’s pretty darn nice. Equivalent arguments exist for Ruby. Ruby isn’t bad because someone wrote a DSL that should’ve been a method and maybe a hash.