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The power of Lisp really boils down to the personal experience of having a connected REPL. If you can evaluate any expression and sub-expression from your editor without having to move it anywhere, retype it, restructure it, or set up a stage for the surrounding state, that is extremely liberating and empowering.

I personally don't understand why anyone who has had the first-hand experience of writing software this way would willingly give up on this fun. Yet, I also understand that personal impressions can be deceiving. Just because I love chocolate and every single person I have ever met also loves it, it doesn't mean that there aren't people who genuinely hate it.

Sure, tons of other programming languages have borrowed features from Lisps and continue to do so, but there exists an emergent category of programs that are assuredly more difficult to build using non-Lispy languages. Check out, for example, hyperfiddle/electric.

My biggest personal regret is that I discovered Lisp too late in my professional life. For a very long time I have had the same experience you're describing — starting projects with high promise but then hitting practical roadblocks. With the caveat that none of them were in Lisp languages.

Today, I don't even think about it — if I have to build something, I'll grab a Lisp dialect. I don't consider Lisps to be different languages; I can relatively easily switch between Clojure, Clojurescript, Clojure-Dart, Fennel, Common Lisp, Elisp, etc. I can't say the same thing even about Javascript and Typescript. Darn, even when I have to switch between different JS libraries, it feels like I have to deal with some mental overhead. That doesn't happen with Lisps.

At the end of the day, there are always trade-offs, whatever tools you choose and whichever language(s) you pick. Nothing is ever perfect. For me, if something isn't working, then maybe I need to find a Lisp better suited for the job. And usually, there are always options to choose from.

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* functions, which are operators which get called with evaluated arguments * macros, which are operators, which get called with source code and which return new source code * special operators (QUOTE, LET, DEFUN, SETQ, IF, ...), which are typically hard-wired in the implementation with both syntax and semantics. Scheme has a set of those, too.

operator n. 1. a function, macro, or special operator. 2. a symbol that names such a function, macro, or special operator. 3. (in a function special form) the cadr of the function special form, which might be either an operator[2] or a lambda expression. 4. (of a compound form) the car of the compound form, which might be either an operator[2] or a lambda expression, and which is never (setf symbol).