I wish paul graham would stop publishing articles claiming lisp has the only useful syntactic metaprogramming system. it's especially irritating since he seems like a smart guy, and should know better. you don't need car and cdr to do good syntactic metaprogramming (indeed, alone they are awkward); you just need a quasi-quote notation and a place to hook your extensions into the evaluator.

hell, even TCL satisfies the menu here, though few people bother to learn it. unless he's been hiding under a rock for a couple years, I can't believe he's seen and understood camlp4, and still thinks defmacro is "unique to lisp".