Comment by schickm

Oh lordy...this essay effectively summarizes the entire codebase of the lisp application that I work on with a team of 6 or so other developers.

I think what can work though is having an awareness of the power of the language you are working with, and then balancing the usage of that power with readability of code. You can write macros all day that save you precious typing time, but when someone else has to figure out those macros all that saved time is lost. Any language that allows the developer to define the syntax will always be troubled with this concept.