Heres why I like Lisp:<p>I recently (~5 months ago) started using Clojure heavily and now find myself much more productive using it than using any of the languages that I have considerably more experience with (I used C++ almost exclusively for 4 years for hobby (mostly game related) projects and toy virtual machines/interpreters; Python for ~4 years for prototyping, web development and GUI development; Java for 2.5 years for server (non-web) development - total programming time including hobby, uni and professional = ~10 years).<p>As an example, I'm very much interested in compilers, virtual machines, programming language design and such, so have been plying around with these in various languages over the years. I wrote my first toy language in VB; wrote a few interpreters, virtual machines and simple parsers in C++ and some parsers, interpreters and assembly code generators in Python; for uni, I implemented a parser and code generator (instruction selection, using maximal munch) in JavaCC - recently I wrote an assembly code generator in Clojure. It took me a weekend and it surpassed the power of anything[1] I'd written in VB, C++, Python or Java. Its flexible and can be easily be extended, its pretty smart and can do some basic optimisation (caching data in registers, function inlining...). I tried writing something similar in Python before, but gave up.<p>My point is that I have much much deeper knowledge of C++, Python and Java, yet I was able to build something MORE complex and extensible in Clojure, in less time, even though I'd only been using it for a few months.<p>Yes, my previous experience played some part in this, but I attribute most of it to the flexibility and power Lisp provides me through easy to use and powerful abstractions, flexible and convenient syntax and interactive development.<p>[1] Of the same scale - any interpreter, code generator, compiler etc. I've written much more powerful systems, of course, but they are huge in comparison and took a lot lot longer than a weekend to write.