And that particular threading macro looks a lot like monadic code in Haskell, which looks a bit like Forth, which looks like a shell command with pipes. Macros

And that particular threading macro looks a lot like monadic code in Haskell, which looks a bit like Forth, which looks like a shell command with pipes. Macros let a domain programmer (as opposed to the compiler writer) in Lisp implement almost any other programming paradigm as a native language feature.