Is metaprogramming useful?

[Georg Wrede]

Steve Horne wrote:
> Brad Anderson <brad at dsource.org> wrote:
> 
>> P.S.  Please no ignorant replies about Lisp is interpreted or Lisp
>> is slower than the imperative languages.
> 
> No - I already did that a few years ago on comp.lang.python. I'm less
>  ignorant these days.
> 
> I have tried to learn Scheme on many occasions, though, and only ever
>  got so far. Sure, it has that key mechanism there, but learning to
> use the language is a bit like learning C++ by first learning how to
> write asm blocks, and finding no teacher who is ever willing to teach
> you the high level tools you need for real everyday work. Fine, you
> can do anything, but why do you always have to reinvent all those
> wheels?

I took a university class in Scheme some 15 years ago. It was rewarding, 
but like you, I felt it was pretty hard. And it's true, recursion may
not be the answer to everything under the sun.

> The thing is that in the real world, most programmers need a
> standard, familiar dialect which has all the everyday high level
> tools available from the start. If OOP is an immediately useful
> concept, programmers should be using OOP from day one, not learning
> how to reinvent OOP from the basic building blocks. So, has anyone
> created widely-used standard librarys for high level programming?

The very point of Common Lisp is *precicely* what you wrote here!

CL tries to be a practical language for people doing real-world 
programming. (Sound familiar?) And they explcitly take distance to 
Scheme, which they consider more Purist, Academic, and for 
theoreticians. (The latter of course disagree, as usual.)