&#62; Ruby takes full advantage of the Lisp chainsaw.<p>I always get a little sad and slightly irritated when I hear people say things like this. This is a statement born from ignorance and misunderstanding.<p>What ruby does to present micro-DSLs are what any language that lets the programmer influence the scope of single dispatch and has a lightweight syntax for function calls can do. They are not what Lisp macros do, and do not even approach all the common "easy" uses cases for macros. Further, they also incur a much larger runtime performance penalty, whereas macros incur none.<p>Ruby has so many merits on its own. There is no need to drum up nonsense about how it's a "lisp without the parenthesis".