I've been a hard core lisper for almost 50 years, and have coded in pretty much every other language in that time, either professionally or for fun. But I always return to lisp, because Lisp isn't a programming language. There are no parens. There is no syntax. There is no spoon. Lisp isn't a programming language, it's hard to describe what it is with a simple term, "meta-language" is the closest I can come, but that doesn't get to it deeply enough. You don't write a program for some problem in lisp, you think beyond the problem to it's meta-problem-space and design a language in which you naturally express prose in that (meta)problem space. Then, given that you now have a natural language (and I mean that in the true sense of "natural language", but not for a human problem space, but for the problems space of the problem you are working on) for that problem space, the problem you were after to begin with is a natural expression in that new language. And you're done.
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