Constructing and manipulating code in Julia is a bit more complicated than Lisp — because Lisp lists are so damned simple. However, not by much. I think most of the complexity of code that generates code is inherent. Sometimes being that meta just makes your brain hurt. Our printf implementation (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/j/printf.j) is about as bad as it gets and it's still pretty understandable — aside from the inherent complexity of implementing printf and the separation of what's computed at compile time and what's computed at run time.