We think that with some discipline, it is possible to come up with macro transformations which are both useful and understandable by a programmer. This means setting clearly defined semantics for the transformations, which is difficult but doable.
If you think macros are kinda crazy (well, they are!) you should look at the implementation of such pythonic constructs like `namedtuple`, the `ast` module and the new Enum library coming out!
We're used to namedtuples doing it like this now, but if namedtuples didn't exist, "fields as a list of strings with spaces inside, or maybe a list of strings" would definitely not make it past code review and probably get me yelled at by my future colleagues.
One thing case classes let you do is implement functionality externally to a class using pattern-matching functions. When you do this, your case class definition will consist of nothing but empty class definitions:
@case
class List:
class Nil(): pass
class Cons(x, xs): pass