Well exactly, this is why languages like Lisp are so seductive and powerful - they let you write languages within the language. When you have a really flexible language like Lisp, it's tempting to produce a meta-language to describe your problem which is specific, terse, and powerful. However there's an interesting trade-off here.

At first this seems like a wonderful solution, but if you ever work with a few other people, and you don't want to be constantly code-switching between your own thoughts today, Bob 6 months ago, Alice 5 years ago, and Bob last year, you don't really want your language to have so much expressive power. It's exhausting and ultimately fruitless in the long term and across teams; what feels powerful and expressive today as one person writing code can change to being a heavy burden when everyone is inventing their own language and forcing you to speak it, or worse when you attempt dialogue with your past self of 2 years ago and have no idea what you were talking about...

Now that's not an argument for lower expressive power always being better, or against generics (for example), but it does behove language designers and users to consider the limits of complexity, as well as the limits of simplicity.

That's a legitimate concern. But then again, the world is full of programming languages. Sometimes you really appreciate what an R gives you when needing to do a lot of statistical computing and data wrangling, or what C or Rust offers for systems programming, and so on.

And speaking of DSLs, the Pandas and Numpy libraries in Python are super useful, and they're possible because Python offers enough metaprogramming facilities to create such libraries, which go a long ways to offering to kinds of programming you find in R or Matlab.

So maybe the Lisp way wasn't wrong? Instead of a bunch of Lisp DSLs we end up with a bunch of programming languages.

I think the point is that Lisp lets you create an ad-hoc, poorly-specified version of any language you like, or perhaps several mashed together, which feels great at the time, but feels horrible when you come back to it later.

DSLs/Jargon/New Languages are constructing a new world, and you need to be really sure the costs of that abstraction are outweighed by concrete and lasting benefits in the domain (sometimes they are, oftentimes they are not), crucially, this sort of language is often best used for a very specific domain and nowhere else (say R for statistics).

The DSL doesn't go away. Your only choices are to implement it, or else read and write the boilerplate you get by imperfectly compiling it in your head.

I agree we're just shifting complexity around, and sometimes it's a matter of taste where it goes, but very flexible languages do allow you to construct a world that is very difficult for others to understand or trace execution in.

That same argument could be applied to functions (or procedures, if you prefer) as well as macros, and yet I don't believe anyone sane is arguing against functions/procedures. Bad code is bad code, just as bad metacode is bad metacode.

I don't believe that Lisp macros are particularly tricky for a professional-level programmer. Yes, students can use them improperly — but students can and will use anything improperly! One grows out of it eventually.