> A poorly documented and tested libraries will give you problems no matter what kinds of entities it defines. Someone who writes macros that nobody can easily

> A poorly documented and tested libraries will give you problems no matter what kinds of entities it defines. Someone who writes macros that nobody can easily grasp will also write functions nobody can easily grasp Lisp makes this so easy to write macros and they have been promoted to be the "my-powerful-dsl-is-the-right-way-to-solve-a-problem" that, IMHO, it works actively against team work unless it is really well-dcumented. Now, mix that with the fact that code is not usually deeply documented and you get a cultural problem into the whole ecosystem. > A macro doesn't interact with complex application state, because that doesn't exist. You never have to attach some gigabyte database and get some objects into the right state before reproducing some expansion problem in a macro. Code generated by a macro could be involved in a problem like that, possibly as a root cause, but tracing through the macro itself isn't Tracing the macro can be as difficult as its expansion. If it gets obtuse it will add a lot of time to your workflow. I know they are powerful but it is probably the last feature I would use in a team, with a lot of care, and for trivial things or for really justified cases and with good documentation. If your code is full of macros, forget about readability, you threw it out through the window. > The people who write awful macros are usually not smart enough to do anything that is actually hard to understand. The problems you will find are lack of hygiene, multiple evaluations and such Because writing macros is not that simple in the first place. I find much easier to write regular code and use the well-known macros than grasp anonymous macro code. There are things you can only do with macros though, like lazy evaluation. But macros must be managed with extra care. For example, maybe instead of a macro it is better to use a higher order function with a closure to keep the code understandable than burying things in layers of macros.