The codebase im in is 10+ years old and macros are everywhere. Were macros a super hyped at one point in the past? I'm fairly new to Clojure just by virtue of being part of this system rewrite but I see stuff everywhere in the code im working in like in the article where there just seems to be macros that accomplish nothing except obscuring already built in constructs for the sake of maybe saving a few lines of code or combining one or two statements into one macro.
Its maddening to just be constantly mentally unpacking this stuff and searching through docs only to find out "Oh its not a clojure thing, someone wrote a macro for this"
They are used in certain libraries like https://github.com/ptaoussanis/timbre but for things that are simply not possible without macros, for example (timbre/spy (+ 1 1)) will actually print both the expression and the result:
DEBUG [ss.experimental.scratch:1] - (+ 1 1) => 2
This is one of my favorite debugging tools. IMO beats a debugger hands down! Printing can also be disabled with a global library flag without code modification.
Perhaps if the macros are "simple" they can be unpacked relatively easily. I do understand how mentally challenging that can be for somebody who's just starting with Clojure. I've been using Clojure for a long time and only just recently became more comfortable with macros after I made a conscious effort in that direction. I'm still far from an "expert" in them.
Its maddening to just be constantly mentally unpacking this stuff and searching through docs only to find out "Oh its not a clojure thing, someone wrote a macro for this"