Lisp is the ultimate language, and if it was combined with JIT compilation, it would be unstoppable. Well, except for one thing - some absurd and irrational fear of the language ( the parenthesis disappear after a few weeks or months of looking at the code), which in turn leads to a lack of libraries.
But seriously - a language that allows you to write completely new constructs at the syntactical level (i.e. if AND or && didn't exist, you could create them yourself. Try that in any other language), while the syntax of hte language itself is extremely regular.. it truly has the ability to be not only the most powerful and flexible, but also the most readable code out there.
It's a shame people are afraid of it. (Just as an example of another cool thing you can do in Lisp that is exponentially harder in any other language is to write your own scripting language on top of Lisp that is translated to actual Lisp code during compilation - which means you've got the readability and flexibility of a script language, with no interface or glue code to tie it to your own code, and yet you get the full speed of Lisp itself. No memory overhead.. no efficiency loss.)
But seriously - a language that allows you to write completely new constructs at the syntactical level (i.e. if AND or && didn't exist, you could create them yourself. Try that in any other language), while the syntax of hte language itself is extremely regular.. it truly has the ability to be not only the most powerful and flexible, but also the most readable code out there.
It's a shame people are afraid of it. (Just as an example of another cool thing you can do in Lisp that is exponentially harder in any other language is to write your own scripting language on top of Lisp that is translated to actual Lisp code during compilation - which means you've got the readability and flexibility of a script language, with no interface or glue code to tie it to your own code, and yet you get the full speed of Lisp itself. No memory overhead.. no efficiency loss.)