TL;DR I was looking for a prototype of a Clojure macro that fulfills three requirements: (1) Generates a function. (2) Takes options as parameters and provides those to the generated function. (3) And lastly the generated function takes arguments. Spoiler! This is it…

(defmacro defsample [name & args]
  (let [options (apply hash-map args)]
    `(defn ~name [input#]
       (prn (str (:text ~options) " " input# ".")))))

(defsample sample :text "Hello")

(sample "world")

Keep on reading for a detailed description. In my quest to come up with the prototype above I started with the most basic version of a macro that generates a function.

;; working, but boring

(defmacro defsample [name]
  `(defn ~name []
     (prn "Hello World.")))

(defsample sample)

(sample)

The key elements of this macro being of course the Syntax Quote ` and the Syntax Unquote ~.

With a little modification the macro will take options and provide these to the generated function:

;; working, but still somewhat boring

(defmacro defsample [name & args]
  (let [options (apply hash-map args)]
    `(defn ~name []
       (prn (:text ~options)))))

(defsample example :text "Hello world.")

(example)

Now, if we also want to pass in arguments to the generated function, the straight forward attempt will not work:

;; defunkt!

(defmacro defsample [name]
  `(defn ~name [input]
     (prn input)))

(defsample sample)

(sample "Hello world.")

The reason that this does not work is, that in the example above the Syntax Quote ` will fully qualify all symbols within. But since qualified symbols cannot be used in the params of a defn this will result in a

CompilerException java.lang.RuntimeException: Can't use qualified name as parameter

So let’s replace the Syntax Quote with a regular Quote ' then…

;; also defunkt!

(defmacro defsample [name]
  '(defn ~name [input]
     (prn input)))

(defsample sample)

(sample "Hello world.")

But, as you might have guessed, using a regular Quote instead of a Syntax Quote doesn’t help, because the Syntax Unquote will not work properly and thus result in a

CompilerException java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: First argument to defn must be a symbol

So instead of using a given symbol, which will be fully qualified by the Syntax Quote, we will have to use a generated symbol. This is anyway a good practice since it will prevent accidental naming collisions. In addition to the function gen-sym which will generate such a generated symbol, there is also a short hand in form of a reader macro, that let’s us mark a symbol as to be replaced with a generated symbol. It works by appending a # to the symbol.

;; working and almost there...

(defmacro defsample [name]
  `(defn ~name [input#]
     (prn input#)))

(defsample sample)

(sample "Hello world.")

Now, combining this with the macro that took options and we finally arrive at the prototype that you saw in the first paragraph.