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Comment on A talk with Walter Bright about Empireparent

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Lisp macros can get super obtuse, no matter what people tell me. When I have used Common Lisp, I try to avoid them most of the time.

I addressed this in my comment:

Regardless, I haven't noticed macros being a footgun in CL. Sure, there are doubtless people out there who have abused it (and will continue to do so) - but that's true for every language feature; meanwhile, it doesn't seem like macros themselves are actually a problem, in the sense that they're particularly easy to abuse compared to the rest of the language (a distinction that I might give to C raw pointers, for instance).

Nobody contests that CL macros can get obtuse - but that's not special. You can write obtuse code in any Turing-complete language. Does that mean that we should abolish Turing-completeness? Of course not.

How much Common Lisp have you read and written?

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