You don't need s-exps to have pattern matching on ast or macros, especially hygienic, pattern based ones. There's sweet.js and macros for python as examples. Al

You don't need s-exps to have pattern matching on ast or macros, especially hygienic, pattern based ones. There's sweet.js and macros for python as examples. All you really need is an API for manipulating AST, be it built-in or 3rd party. S-exps are especially nice if you want defmacro-style macros, but I don't believe they should be used very much.