I was only referring to your last point, specifically this: > The point I'm making here is that you can do pretty much everything you want to do without macros

I was only referring to your last point, specifically this: > The point I'm making here is that you can do pretty much everything you want to do without macros. You'll just have to write quite a bit more code and come up with many more metaphors and analogies in order to get it to work. Macros just let you get straight to the point by extending the language. This is all true, but it's also very one-sided. It makes macros look like a universal solution to all abstraction problems and without any downsides at that. Now, as I said, I don't really believe that the "downsides" are that important, but I wanted to add to your comment by pointing out their existence. I also didn't read the GP comment as dismissive, it seems a bit pedantic at worst.