That view makes a lot of sense for a lot of applications. Don't get me wrong. I think my college calculus professor was right when he said that in mathematics, power tools are ineligant when hand tools will suffice. That attitude won't lead you far wrong in software development either.

The problem though is that power tools are sometimes better at some things than the hand tools are. In this case we can't generate through compiled Perl code alone an elegant function to provide the functionality so we are left with, as here, a baroque and generalized version, or we get to generate Perl as text strings, then compile it and install the resulting function in the symbol table.

To some extent once you get into perl that generates functions and installs them in the symbol table, you are already outside hand tool territory. The question is what one can do to create elegant code at that point.

Macros are helpful because they allow for better tailoring of the code generated. I don't think they should ever be a tool of first resort, but they can be really, really helpful in some areas.