I mean, yes, the biggest win of lisp over other languages is that the metalanguage is the language. That is what is special about lisp. That is, when defining a

I mean, yes, the biggest win of lisp over other languages is that the metalanguage is the language. That is what is special about lisp. That is, when defining a macro, you are simply treating the program itself as data. Since code and data take the same form, this is a really natural way to metaprogram. In most other languages, it is... not. Now, the featured article picks a... not very good example, for this feature of the language. But that doesn't mean that metaprogramming is useless. Much of a (big) lisp program is building up a domain specific language out of macros, then solving the problem at hand with it. This is the biggest power of lisp, and also the biggest weakness--every lisp program is written in a different language. In lisp you express your problem in macros, and then express your solution in the language you've built up.