My personal opinion is that a type system on top of macros needs types that are too painful for anyone to actually use. The winning element of Lisp macros is th

My personal opinion is that a type system on top of macros needs types that are too painful for anyone to actually use. The winning element of Lisp macros is that they are dirt simple and untyped, which makes them easier to write (but makes run-time errors more likely). At a meta level, you might as well argue that Python programmers should be using ML instead, since the features are similar but ML is statically typed so more errors can be found at compile-time. The logic of the argument is correct, and yet Python (and Ruby and Javascript and so on) win. Again, I think its to do with easy of expression and less thought up front, but I'm not really sure.