This is not a "Clojure thing." The advice to noobs not to go hog wild with macros is common among experienced Lisp programmers in all dialects. Paul Graham him

This is not a "Clojure thing." The advice to noobs not to go hog wild with macros is common among experienced Lisp programmers in all dialects. Paul Graham himself refers to it in _On Lisp_: Chapter 8 is titled "When to Use Macros" and the first section is "When Nothing Else Will Do."