Haskell doesn't need macros, eh?

[pozorvlak]

A comparison of the Haskell argmunger with its Arc equivalent (or even its Perl equivalent) should make something clear. It's been claimed that Haskell doesn't need macros, because most of the things that Lispers need macros for can be done in Haskell using lazy evaluation and so on. But the argmunger example makes it clear that there are things for which Lispers don't need macros and Haskellers do - if not Template Haskell macros, then SYB or DRiFT or some other macro-like facility.

Lispers often say that coding in other languages feels like manually generating macroexpansions. I'm nobody's idea of a Lisp hacker, but I often feel like this when I'm writing Haskell. Which is why I'm learning about Template Haskell even though I'm not yet au fait with things like do-notation and monad transformers, which most Haskell experts would probably consider more basic. Would you choose before or after you'd walked to Moscow to staunch the blood from your severed arm?