It's not bullet proof, but I've seen people describe reader macros and macros for semi advanced stuff on old mailing list. To them it was a natural too to turn annoyances into natural pleasurable work (think not having to deal with xml/html as strings). There's a couple of papers on some japanese research lab that showed how to turn your common lisp code into pascal with the generic pretty printer.

These sort of things seem to be trivial in the lisp world, whereas until a few years ago it was alienating topics for most of the industry (since we had the transpilers fever and jsx for instance)