I love using Julia, but for me writing Julia macros came with a steeper learning curve than in Lisp / Scheme, due in part to the syntax. I kept wishing Julia was a layer on top of a Lisp, and that I can just write Lisp macros. (I know the parser is currently in Scheme, but you can't exploit that easily.)

I tend to end up writing `Expr` objects directly when I'm building larger macros as I find them much easier to reason about. It's clearly not as convenient/clean as Lisp though. (David Moon actually sent a PR last year to make hygiene much easier.. unfortunately it got stuck for a while, but the PR was recently rebased and hopefully will be merged eventually).

Regarding the learning curve: we rewrote the first half of the Metaprogramming section of the manual a few months ago to try to provide a more gradual introduction, especially for people without a Lisp background. Objectively I don't know if the change has helped, but I tell myself that the number of macro-related questions has gone down :)

We would really like to make these tools accessible to people both with and without a formal CS background (probably the majority of Julia users will fall in the latter category). So, if you have any suggestions for doc/pedagogy improvements in this area, I would be very happy to hear them!

The obvious solution is to write a julia macro that implements lisp macros as a DSL ;)

No need, Julia comes with a builtin lisp.