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> So adding custom constructs to the language makes it stay familiar?

There are rules and conventions for writing macros. If you follow them, their usage will be clear for anyone who knows the language - because the language itself includes a lot of macros and they all follow the same set of rules. Common Lisp, Clojure and Elixir are very good examples of this (with Racket taking it up to 11).

Of course, you can write macros which work and behave in unexpected, weird ways. In practice, though, you don't - why the heck would you?

Because you don't use them in weird ways, surely, but whoever wrote this code did.

... which often includes yourself a year later.

I don't have enough experience with macros to agree/disagree, but parent's comment stood out to me because of the particular framework I've been using lately.

> It's nice if you're copy/pasting stack overflow snippets or your use case is very standard, it sucks if you want to modify the code to do something a bit different and out of the box because now you have to learn the rules of this custom DSL.

This basically describes Spring, and I'm not just being snarky. To someone from the outside, Spring's annotations seem to have all the problems you list. I have trouble imagining that heavy use of macros could be much worse, and I can certainly see the overlap between macros and frameworks.

Every program is a DSL. What do you think you're doing when you define types and functions except make a little DSL of your own? Granted, your "DSL" is somewhat semantically restricted in that it has to conform to the limitations of its host environment, but this limitation doesn't free readers from having to learn how your "DSL" works and imagine ways to manipulate it.

Seen in this light, the kind of DSL you can create with a full-blown macro system isn't all that different.

Programming, in large part, is an exercise in language creation.

Basically you evolve the language into the domain of the application. Rather than lowering the application into the domain of the language.

Emacs-lisp is one example of a Lisp that has evolved into the domain of text editing.

If you need new constructs, it's more familiar to do that in the same language than to go to a different language.