I took a course in Racket in first year (required for all first year math/CS students at my school) and I've spent some time in the Clojure community as well. "Code as data" is an oft-repeated selling point of Lisp and Lisp-like languages.
When you actually start using these languages, you find yourself tempted to leverage this property and try writing lots of macros. But then you go back to the community and everyone tells you "the first rule of macros is you don't write macros." It turns out that if you use macros all over the place then your code becomes impenetrable. The problem is that macros allow you to circumvent the expected order of evaluation and produce your own novel syntactic structures. This puts lie to the old claim "Lisp has no syntax." In reality, Lisp has tons of syntax, it's just informal and buried within the definitions of macros.
It parallels the problem put forth in Jo Freeman's famous piece, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" [1]. Any group that purports to adopt a structureless organization ends up having a hidden, informal structure. This is the way of Lisps as well.
When you actually start using these languages, you find yourself tempted to leverage this property and try writing lots of macros. But then you go back to the community and everyone tells you "the first rule of macros is you don't write macros." It turns out that if you use macros all over the place then your code becomes impenetrable. The problem is that macros allow you to circumvent the expected order of evaluation and produce your own novel syntactic structures. This puts lie to the old claim "Lisp has no syntax." In reality, Lisp has tons of syntax, it's just informal and buried within the definitions of macros.
It parallels the problem put forth in Jo Freeman's famous piece, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" [1]. Any group that purports to adopt a structureless organization ends up having a hidden, informal structure. This is the way of Lisps as well.
[1] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm