Spent some hours the past couple of days reading Practical Common Lisp about a computer language called LISP. One of the things about LISP that really appeals to me is the facility for macros. This allows one to write functions that return code and then use that returned code in a program. I often find myself writing nearly identical function definitions in a variety of places and it would be great to replace that stuff with a macro that produced the nearly-but-not-totally identical definitions automatically. I will have to keep LISP in mind next time I have a little project that could be a testbed.
Other helpful resources include SLIME, Emacs and OpenMCL which all conspire to make a great LISP environment for Mac OS X.
