Agreed on the obsession with brevity. Reminds me of mathematical proofs, where you work out everything offline, and then make the proof elegantly brief. There

Agreed on the obsession with brevity. Reminds me of mathematical proofs, where you work out everything offline, and then make the proof elegantly brief. There is a similar process going on here - writing macros really does boil down to that kind of offline work. Just as with such elegant proofs, though, you do need a pencil and paper to trace through the steps. And if the programmer were anything but of the highest caliber, it is fairly easy to get tripped up. The way blub languages handle (the absence of) macros for td, tr etc. is to invent templating languages (JSP etc) where you embed Java inside HTML. You basically have a DSL living in a separate syntactic space. That gets the job done, for the specific problem space at hand (web apps). I have come to like that syntactic space separation: HTML lives as HTML, SQL lives as SQL and so on. With macros, you are getting everything to live in the same syntactic space, so you get the proliferation of tokens, without that structural separation that aids in comprehension.