> If anything, generations of programmers learned from experience that instruction systems that are orthogonal to the language and blindly manipulate text strings while ignoring semantics and context and even basic types that is readily available, such as the C preprocessor or M4, leads to a subpar developer experience, code that is far harder to reason about, and causes bugs that are hard to troubleshoot.

Good thing Lisp macros are absolutely nothing like that.

Parse tree manipulation, on the other hand, can be extremely reliable and make code that's much easier to read about.