> Professor Steve G. Johnson explains metaprogramming (around 10 min mark) and says "most of the time, don't do metaprogramming." As someone who has given simi

> Professor Steve G. Johnson explains metaprogramming (around 10 min mark) and says "most of the time, don't do metaprogramming." As someone who has given similar advice when teaching metaprogramming in the past, I'll add some context to that: most people new to metaprogramming seem to reach for it all the time for some reason, in situations where the usual programming constructs are perfectly adequate. Imagine if any time you introduce people to multithreading, they start writing all their code as parallel threaded code (which happens to some degree, but is limited by factors include what a PITA it is). That's the context in which such warnings are deemed necessary. Just like multithreading, manual memory management, and other great-power-great-responsibility programming concepts, macros shouldn't be the first tool you reach for, but when you need them you really need them, and they can make your life so much easier.