One of the greatest barriers to lisp for me is the lack of free IDEs and better tooling. Having cut my teeth in programming using VB, I generally find any language that doesn't come with a GUI builder and a half-decent IDE with intellisense out of the box to be dismal.(Scripting languages is the exception) I really hope someone will improve on the tooling of lisp. I strongly believe in the mantra that you should not do something that the computer the computer can do better, I believe a smart intellisense autocompletion is much better than having to figure out the intricacies of emacs/vim/<insert your favourite editor here>. I really like the syntax of lisp, it would be really sad if I can't be productive with it. :(