Also, metaprogramming is no longer exclusive to Lisp, other languages are adding advanced features all the time, so there's fewer reasons to move to Lisp.
>Also, metaprogramming is no longer exclusive to Lisp, other languages are adding advanced features all the time, so there's fewer reasons to move to Lisp.
You'll see many people in such languages say things as "please don't use macros", "metaprogramming makes things difficult", "metaprogramming is hard", "macros make the code hard to read" and so on.
Metaprogramming in all other languages is usually difficult to implement OR is limited to text substitution (example: C), which makes them a mess!
Languages with true macros mean the code gets transformed to an AST first; your macro needs to transform this AST. Thus you need to learn a whole host of functions/methods/classes and to learn the structure of this AST.
While in Lisp, macros are written using plain regular Lisp. There is almost nothing new to learn, really. This is because the language is formed of s-expressions, which are really easy to manipulate. So doing metaprogramming is almost no more difficult than writing a regular function. In Lisp, metaprogramming is not an advanced topic; quite the opposite, is a beginners' topic.
If such "other languages" wanted to make metaprogramming easy, then the language would have to be written in s-expressions.
Which means the language would probably be labeled as a "Lisp dialect", or as a "Lisp-like language."
>other languages are adding advanced features all the time
Yes, but in Lisp you can add them yourself, you don't need to wait for Google or Oracle or your Benevolent-dictator-for-life to approve the features you need, and don't need to wait for the next version of the compiler.
Most language have token meta programming features. Which most of the times are unusable. Things like C macros and source filters break all the time, and are largely useless for things apart from Global variable declarations.
So sorry, most languages don't have the features lisp has. Not even remotely close.