I had a nutty professor in college. He hooked me on scripting languages -- his favorite was gawk. He would write absolutely everything in gawk. Need a data structure? Use an associative array, it is the Gawk Way. Need code reuse? Cheaper to delete and start over. He was brilliant, I learned a lot from him, and I would not let him near my code if my life depended on it.

Lisp has always struck me as a "nutty professor" sort of language. I hear it is wonderful and pure and that if you truly grok it you see the Hand of God Himself in its awesome majesty staring out from within your code. But while Lisp seems to be long on awe, it seems to be short on software I'd actually want to use.

No one has ever claimed to have had a religious experience from reading PHP code (and if they did, I would suggest dousing them with holy water from a safe distance). But PHP has Wordpress. "Lisp can do a blogging platform too! Better! Stronger! Faster! We can do it, we have the technology!" Yes, Lisp can... but Lisp doesn't. (And if it did, I have a disturbing premonition that the steps to build a piece of blogging software would start with "#1: You need a webserver. None of the existing ones are exactly right, but that is no problem, since making a web server is easy in Lisp. First we define a few simple macros...")

Now, if I were a Lisp developer POed at ignorant savages on the Internet suggesting my language was perhaps a bit ivory-towery, I'd probably spend my time writing software which was so good they'd be unable to ignore me.