The Lisp Curse (2011)
He writes a seductive argument, but it isn&#x27;t very satisfying to conclude &quot;this language is so powerful that it defeats itself&quot;. Likely there are other, more mundane reasons why the theoretical purity of the lisps isn&#x27;t useful in practice.<p>For example, the endless (bracketing). My understanding is that the power of lisp macros comes from this questionable, but distinctively lispy, syntax. And I say questionable compared to natural human scripts - none of them work from inside to out. I&#x27;ve seen left to right (eg, English), right to left and up to down (eg, Chinese). If there were some better known examples of what lisp macros were good for then maybe it would get better traction. But lisp macros don&#x27;t seem to have an example of why they are worth that trade.<p>Also, in the early days, C was a pretty close mirror to the underlying code execution - there was probably less mental overhead to squeezing out better performance.