Both Ruby and Python are too slow for me, and neither is Lispy enough.

Slow in what regard, for what use case?

Performance is not a factor in shell scripts where the majority of the work is done by C-programs and the script merely shuttles parameters to the desired places.

It's not as if bash were fast, mind you. Lisps already exist.

nim!

It has full macros, even!

and it's super, super, fast

Nim's not Lispy either, and macros alone are not enough. To make macro use feel natural because they're not much different than using the core language, the language needs to be homoiconic, which to my knowledge Nim is not.

In any case, macros are not what draw me to Lisp, but its unparalleled combination of ease of use, readability, and power... along with 70 years of development and tooling.

So I could just use a Lisp or Scheme, which I do. They can be plenty fast too (see Chicken, for instance, which -- like Nim -- compiles down to C).

It's lispy in what it can do, not in having a rat's nest of parens, true.

I'd love a concrete example of a macro you could express in lisp and not in nim.

But it's macros absolutely operate on a syntax tree - refer to https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut3.html#introduction-the-syntax-...