15. More macros and DSLs

This chapter covers A review of Clojure macros Anaphoric macros Shifting computation to compile time Macro generating macros Domain-specific languages in Clojure

This final chapter is about what many consider the most powerful feature of Clojure. John McCarthy, the inventor of the Lisp programming language, once said that Lisp is a local maximum in the space of programming languages. Clojure macros make Clojure a programmable programming language because it can do arbitrary code transformations of Clojure code, using Clojure itself. No programming language outside the Lisp family can do this in such a simple way. To reiterate the obvious, this is possible because code is data.