How useful are Lisp macros?
- by compman
Common Lisp allows you to write macros that do whatever source transformation you want.
Scheme gives you a hygienic pattern-matching system that lets you perform transformations as well. How useful are macros in practice? Paul Graham said in Beating the Averages that:
The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25% macros.
What sorts of things do people actually end up doing with macros?