I agree wholeheartedly, and would add: The usage of macros is something that can (and should) be avoided in most cases, but in order for you to learn when one should or should not write macros, you should write programs large (or complex) enough that you would need to develop a domain-specific language for the problem at hand. The creation and use of small utility functions which reflect your growing understanding of the problem will remove some of the need to write macros, until you need to perform syntactic transformations. (Note that this is the case where writing a syntactic transformation is the simplest and fastest solution to whatever problem you're working on at the time). You usually don't know when this will happen until you need to do so, but it seems to be the safer option to use a Lisp, which allows you to do that very quickly.