While I certainly understand the sentiment, I wasn’t referring to it for learning how to write macros but to underline that “macros that generate code during compilation” are of central importance in Elixir - and people coming from languages where that capability isn’t a core feature need to be made aware of it as soon as possible.
In my mind some macros express code that “hangs in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t” - as a result from a novice’s point of view it isn’t at all clear how that code can have any run-time effect and/or how the code connects to the “rest-of-the-world” until they are made fully aware of Elixir’s meta-programming facilities (I’m surprised this hasn’t made it into Elixir’s biggest gotchas).
One good example is the plug router:
defmodule MyRouter do
use Plug.Router
plug :match
plug :dispatch
One has no hope of understanding what is happening here until the realization comes that a whole bunch of code is “hydrated” here, in place, during compilation. The faster any novice realizes that the better. So while writing macros can wait, reading them and understanding their implications on the language as a whole cannot - at least in my opinion.
