The problem with this argument is, that you will never have the amount of independned development on every feature. There are usually only a relativly small amount of people at the core of a langague.
If I want a new feature in the language is very hard to get it in and once its in its in. With macros diffrent people can do there own thing and indepently develop it.
Look for example at core.match, in every other language something like it would have been a new language feature. Clojure now has a state of the art pattern matcher without Rich or anybody doing anything.
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The problem with this argument is, that you will never have the amount of independned development on every feature. There are usually only a relativly small amount of people at the core of a langague.
If I want a new feature in the language is very hard to get it in and once its in its in. With macros diffrent people can do there own thing and indepently develop it.
Look for example at core.match, in every other language something like it would have been a new language feature. Clojure now has a state of the art pattern matcher without Rich or anybody doing anything.