I gave some more technical details in another reply. It's one of those things I thought for a long time, and I didn't think was very controversial, but I suppos

I gave some more technical details in another reply. It's one of those things I thought for a long time, and I didn't think was very controversial, but I suppose it is. Really, what I meant was the metaprogramming associated with homoiconicity can't be done in a useful and referentially transparent way. That's because "eval"-like things are not referentially transparent. However, there are other uses for homoiconicity aside from executing the code in an eval-like way. For instance, a text editor might use that property to inspect and transform the code being edited more easily. Also, I'm sure there are plenty of times it just makes things easier. I think metaprogramming is also at odds with static analysis (e.g. a good type system), simply because the code itself is not static enough to analyze.