I think macros share some characteristics of templates, they are templates for making new code. But macros are also aware of context information (closure, dynamic variables, can be debugged, ...)<p>I think that if clients were programmers, they should be looking for more templates and macros.<p>As many of the jobs are about web programming, and clients are not programmers macros are not so useful in this context, so templates are winning and languages are php, python, ruby and perl are beating languages like lisp.<p>So, if the market change and clients are not anymore interested in web programming and another type of job get at the top we will see a strong increase in macro programming for this new job, perhaps a new kind of mixture between a template, a macro and a parallel library (STM, pure functions, functional programming, erlang hot actualization of code.