> Hmm, one might think there's a trend in how almost none of the 'programmable programming languages' catch on. Lithp, Rebol, Forth, Nemerle, this one.

Uh, Lisp caught on quite well. Rebol was held back by coming out when being open source (or at least having an open spec) was expected for languages, but it wasn't until most of the interest had passed. Forth I gather was pretty popular, but fell of its peak even before Lisp did.

Of course, while not with Lisp style macros, pervasive metaprogramming was a key distinguishing feature of both Python and Ruby, which both reached fairly intense levels of popularity. And of course Perl...

> Me, I find macros and implicits repulsive.

And it's fine that that is your taste, but it's clearly not as universal as you would like to pretend.