The closest thing to an explanation I found here:
Paul Graham is a proponent of having “the whole language there all the time”
As a crude analogy he wants the option of building the plane while it’s flying. I think most people are uncomfortable with this level of freedom. This is why macros are generally considered an option of last resort in Elixir unless you’re using it to build a domain specific language or something.
As a counter to this level of optimism:
Bear in mind that Paul Graham is a philosophy major who wrote a shopping cart in Lisp that was bought by Yahoo and subsequently rewritten. He struck gold, retired young and then spent years writing stuff like this.
I’m still a fan. Dare to dream otherwise nothing gets better.
