I’ve found this thread really interesting, new people can relive past discussions as need be to flesh out their understanding.
There is no requirement for people who have seen such a conversation before to provide any input. If they feel they have the time, a quick link to previous threads is appreciated.
Thinking about the tradeoffs present in some tool is a very effective way to understand the best uses for it. In my experience.
Really!? I started with standard conditional jumps in assembly, which is an if anyway. I’m curious about your experiences! Perhaps a new thread and/or blog post? 
I’ve used it.
Plus once hashed out it can be linked to and searched far more easily.
Very very much so!
I think macros are more of a hindrance than a help 90% of the time.
Confusing.
Suspect plain polymorphism could be used in many cases which macros are used..
I would remove the end from anonymous functions. For example:
Enum.map([1, 2, 3], fn x -> x * x)
Instead of:
Enum.map([1, 2, 3], fn x -> x * x end)
Actually, I take that back. I wouldn’t remove anything. I mean, what the hell do I know? Yeah, not having to “end” anonymous functions would be nice, but I’m sure the language designers evaluated their decisions far better than I can.
Do you use pipes? Do you use structs?
Many of the features that are ‘built-in’ into Elixir, are actually themselves written in Elixir, using the macro system. So even if you would want to use them yourself, they are very useful!
Nothing without good, valid reason, and support from José and other Elixir experts such as Chris 
Now that we have the new #community:suggestions-proposals section all serious proposals should go through the process there
Absolutely not. There is no way polymorphism can perform, for example, for style code generation without significant overhead, nor generate compile-time constant DSEL interfaces, etc… etc… Even the |> macro is not possible with polymorphism, it just makes no sense as a comparison construct.
I personally see polymorphism of the OOP variety way WAY overused in places that it absolutely does not belong.
But you are aware that nil isn’t some magic value in Elixir and Erlang? The same goes for true and false. All of them are just simple atoms, so :nil == nil always. So this is quite impossible to remove it as a whole.
