Just when I thought Lisp had been ransacked for every last feature that language designers were willing to steal, the "War on commas" pops up -- complete with d

Just when I thought Lisp had been ransacked for every last feature that language designers were willing to steal, the "War on commas" pops up -- complete with discussion of the essential differences might exist between "(" and "{", the pain of needing another way to say "if", and the lack of support for the rest of the language. And the last couple interesting Swift libraries I saw had .gyb files and #if directives. Apple tried really hard to make a fully static language that was visually elegant (and looked like C), but in the end we need so many dynamic features that what we ended up with seems much more complex than just having had well-designed macros from the start. The cynic in me suspects that they know this would be worse, but has the advantage that only Apple can add such features, not the common programmer. OTOH, the cynic in me knows that staying far away from Lisp is par for the course, and every new language needs their code to look like an example from the designer's tattered copy of "K&R". At least they managed to drop C-style for-loops in a mainstream language, so next time a company decides to design a new language, we can hopefully start there. I predict we're about 3 generations of corporate languages away from seeing macros get "invented" again.