I disagree with your assessment, and I guess with Sussman&#x27;s appraisal as well.<p>I believe that you are mistaken in your belief that Lisp isn&#x27;t the most advanced language. The submitted thread contains many comments that state that Lisp is basically a pure implementation of the untyped lambda calculus. I don&#x27;t think this is correct -- Lisp is itself a unique model of computing, and it generally unifies Turing&#x27;s and Church&#x27;s computational model in a relatively unbiased manner IMO. For that reason, I regard Lisp as the most flexible languages of all &quot;multi-paradigmed&quot; languages. The Lisp machine&#x27;s software was basically exclusively implemented in Lisp; the fact that developers could comfortably accomplish that testifies to Lisp&#x27;s flexibility.<p>In Lisp, entire linguistic constructs can be dynamically created to iteratively solve a problem. That&#x27;s basically a bunch of buzzwords, but 
I think the statement holds significance. I&#x27;ve read comments elsewhere regarding Lisp as the &quot;Maxwell&#x27;s equations&quot; of PLT. I agree with that. If you&#x27;re not familiar with the meta-circular evaluator, I encourage you to read up on it, as it justifies this statement.<p>That being said, Haskell&#x27;s type system is really fantastic. I&#x27;d love an implementation of a Lisp with a Hindley Milner-esque type system.<p>Basically, I think Lisp is the most advanced language because it captures what a language is perfectly. This makes it free to involve and embrace new ideas, and has contributed to its continual success and long life.