Practicality: PHP vs Lisp
"PHP is overly verbose and terribly inconsistent and lacks powerful methods of abstraction and proper closures and easy-to-use meta-programming goodness"<p>Sometimes I wonder how much closures and meta-programming is just code for coding sake.  I've seen lots of examples of 5 line LISP code that does something totally amazing but you don't really know what it means but it's so abstract.  If you have a quick job to do, I don't see that it's a limitation in using a language that requires to build the most straight forward solution.<p>PHP is ugly, but for the most part it isn't horrible -- these days you can easily avoid some of the worst parts and concentrate on making code that would be very equivalent to the same code in, say, Java.  PHP is very straight forward -- it means what it says.<p>"Your web framework in PHP probably isn't continuation-based, it probably doesn't compile your s-expression HTML tree into assembler code before rendering it."<p>This just sounds like over-engineering the problem.