Oh, I'm quite aware of it!  I'm not saying that image-based development is unworkable; I'm saying that developing in a monolithic image seems more difficult to me than systems made up of many smaller pieces (files, in this case).<p>Nor am I knocking lisp. I think there are a lot of great things in various lisps: though I have specific nits to pick with each lisp I've actually used, some of the problems I encountered were due to attempting to solve problems I would have just lived with in other languages.  I've said elsewhere that I think one of the reasons lisp languishes is that it's seductively powerful -- why spend time learning someone else's library when you can write the part you need in less time?<p>I agree with one of the g'parents, though, that lisps' strengths are in the macros and code-is-data areas, and passing over that in favor of things that most every competing language has in this era (built-in datatypes, nice IDEs, REPLs) seems severely underpromising.