Lisp is a beautiful language but I think the biggest problem with it is its proponents failing to explain the merits. I'm sorry, this post would have probably made a bit more sense 15 years ago, but definitely not now.<p>&#62; (a) Very fast development that is enabled by CL (e.g., <i>everything</i> 
from hash tables to string-operators to memory management is 
automatically included - there is nothing that is not included).<p>Name a modern mainstream language that doesn't have these things.<p>&#62; (b) Excellent programming environments - e.g., parentheses-savvy editor.<p>You haven't seen XCode, Delphi or MS Visual Studio, where, for example, you can jump to the definition of a symbol with "one click", allow interactive step-by-step debugging with variable watch, disassembly, stack trace, etc - I shouldn't really name all the things that are possible in a typical modern IDE. And I don't know any text editor which is not paren-savvy.<p>&#62; (c) Excellent compiler, especially with declarations, enables very fast code.<p>A compiler which doesn't "enable very fast code" has no place under the sun nowadays.<p>&#62; (d) Excellent system stability with no random crashes at all.<p>Very exciting, although GC-based languages (i.e. those usually lacking pointers) should not crash at all, or if they do crash that's a shame. Stability and robustness of your compiler and your runtime system shouldn't really be mentioned as a merit. If it doesn't meet stability standards, it shouldn't be released.<p>&#62; (e) Macros and all that.<p>Finally getting to the point and you say "and all that"? Btw, "all that" includes unification of code and data - something no other language provides, let's say, idiomatically. This is an amazing feature, and in fact Lisp macros are Lisp macros thanks to just that - unification of code and data and symbolic nature of the language.<p>Memory footprint: megabytes do matter because of the CPU cache. A 30,000 LOC program should take a few megabytes at most and fit a modern CPU cache entirely. Compared to a 50MB program the performance gain can be enormous.