Hopefully you agree Lisp is more productive than C++? Lisp is however not quite fast or efficient enough to displace C++ completely, mainly because, like Java and Go, it has a garbage collector. C++ was very much the language in Java's crosshairs. Java made programming a bit safer, nulls and threads not withstanding, but was certainly not as productive as Lisp. Meanwhile Lisp evolved into Haskell and OCaml, two very productive languages which thankfully are inspiring everyone else to improve. Phil Wadler (from the original Haskell committee) has even been helping the Go team.

Just for an example: on the recent 1billion rows challenge, the top java contender takes only 2x as much time as a SIMD-optimized C one.

I consider that a bad practice, because it doesn't make things obvious. I guess it works so well in Go, because the language itself is small, so that you don't have to remember much of these "syntax tricks". Making things explicit, but not too verbose, is the best way in my opinion. JetBrains has done amazing work in this area with Kotlin.

    for (item in collection) {
        ...
    }

    list.map { it + 1 }

    fun printAll(vararg strings: String)

    constructor(...)

    companion object

I like the `for..in` which reads like plain English. Or `vararg` is pretty clear - compare that to "*" and the like in other languages. Or `constructor` can not be more explicit, there is no need to teach anyone that the name must be the same as the class name (and changed accordingly). Same is true for companion object (compare with Scala).