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See "The Blub Paradox" in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html on why it's hard to get this across.

The "clear advantage" that Lisp still has is the best type of homoiconicity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity); see items 8 and 9 in http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html.

I'm not sure why this is hard to get across; my first introduction to Lisp was a "Learn Lisp in 15 Minutes" talk/mini-seminar/whatever and it was immediately obvious to me.

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Yes, I thought about it as I was writing the post. But what I'm interested in finding out is how (and if) it is any different today (2010) than it was when the essay was written. In other words, has anything changed that would make another language a close alternative to Lisp? Or is Lisp still at the top of the continuum ?

The idea of the language continuum was probably made up for rhetorical reasons. Its not actually a strait line, with machine language at one end, and lisp at the other, its more like a tree, or a graph. Lisp happens to be a good language in a lot of cases, but not in all.

Well, you might want to look at other declarative language paradigms (which you can of course be neatly programed in Lisp) such logic programming (e.g. Prolog) and defining functions through pattern matching (e.g. Haskell, Qi).

There's some serious power there and in the latter case it's general purpose.

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