Macros returning macros happens in every Lisp, including Clojure. It’s no biggie. Hygiene has nothing to do with it and there are ways of properly managing unique symbols in all Lisps, even if some dialects are more manual than in Scheme/Racket.
I know, but the point is that in Clojure there's a bit of a culture of not writing macros unless you have to, while in Racket there's no such thing. Agreed that you can write macros just fine in other lisps.
The Clojure community is definitely less macro-crazy than other Lisp communities. But it’s also very programmer-specific. I’ve worked on OSS Clojure code where the original programmer loved macros. In general, I found it more annoying because reading through recursive macros is just more difficult than reading a simple function. So, I think it’s better for the community to de-emphasize macros, in general. Even if I want back to programming in CL or Scheme/Racket, I think I’d be much more judicious about using macros. Again, nothing against macros in general. They are a powerful tool in Lisp. But, to quote Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility.
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Macros returning macros happens in every Lisp, including Clojure. It’s no biggie. Hygiene has nothing to do with it and there are ways of properly managing unique symbols in all Lisps, even if some dialects are more manual than in Scheme/Racket.
I know, but the point is that in Clojure there's a bit of a culture of not writing macros unless you have to, while in Racket there's no such thing. Agreed that you can write macros just fine in other lisps.
The Clojure community is definitely less macro-crazy than other Lisp communities. But it’s also very programmer-specific. I’ve worked on OSS Clojure code where the original programmer loved macros. In general, I found it more annoying because reading through recursive macros is just more difficult than reading a simple function. So, I think it’s better for the community to de-emphasize macros, in general. Even if I want back to programming in CL or Scheme/Racket, I think I’d be much more judicious about using macros. Again, nothing against macros in general. They are a powerful tool in Lisp. But, to quote Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility.