Comment by rmunn

"... all the benefits without additional parenthesis too?"

I guess you don't like Lisp's syntax. I didn't either until I realized the key insight: when you're writing Lisp, you're basically writing an AST. Which is why it's so easy to manipulate your code. Want a new feature the language doesn't have, such as the pattern-matching they added to C# a few versions back? You can add it yourself; you don't need to wait for a language committee to implement it years after you needed it. That's all that macros are: functions that take AST and return AST, which is then executed.

And once I realized that Lisp's syntax was basically an AST, I no longer saw the parentheses. Now I just see blonde, brunette, redhead... Oops. Sorry. Wrong reference.