Is metaprogramming useful?

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Brad Anderson" <brad at dsource.org> wrote in message 
news:ekhh7s$2e7$1 at digitaldaemon.com...

> Poor Lisp.  It just sits there, 50 years old, debugged, optimized, and 
> ready
> to go, while the imperative languages try to inch closer over the decades.

In that case.. it'd be another interesting experiment to try to come up with 
a new syntax for Lisp that appeals to more programmers than it does now ;)

I really can't get past the parentheses.  I know Georg said it's an excuse, 
but I really, truly cannot understand most Lisp code because I can't tell 
which right paren out of a group of six is closing which left paren.  I'm 
sure bracket highlighting in a code editor can help, but why should that be 
necessary?  I'm sure a good deal of those parens can be stripped out, or 
replaced by other brackets, or just moved around to get a more algebraic 
syntax.