Lisp culture's thing about extending via libraries instead of evolving syntax means:
- you have to get good at shopping for libraries;
- it can be hard to discover stuff; if a feature were syntax someone would have had to at least stick it in a reference doc someplace; and
- probably leads directly to the Lisp Curse (everyone invents their own half-assed library, because they hate shopping).
@rgm you are neglecting the cons of the thing about evolving syntax.
- You have to learn a new syntax to use the thing
- You can only pray that the documentation is up to date, because
- code readability suffers majorly from "language evolution"
- in modern dev (at least webdev) library-focus is the way to be a good citizen so your thing can be shared and integrated easily
- #Clojure , being hosted, is already heavily biased toward sharing things with the ecosystem, which macros make harder
- data-driven development aims to bypass this entirely, since data is more pure (stable, non-committal) than syntax
Your point makes a lot of sense for self-contained projects, of which I have several and should definitely explore syntax evolution with, but there is this other side. My ¢2
