But there is nothing stopping non homoiconic languages from adding first-class macros (macros that are written in the language itself). That is true in theory.

But there is nothing stopping non homoiconic languages from adding first-class macros (macros that are written in the language itself). That is true in theory. However, I struggled with camlp5 [1] for hours to achieve something that could be done trivially with a lisp macro. I'm certain its because the I was having to do much more than rewrite a datastructure. Interestingly, it was this very experience that moved me back to lisp. [1] http://martin.jambon.free.fr/extend-ocaml-syntax.html http://martin.jambon.free.fr/extend-ocaml-syntax.html