For me, the biggest selling point is that it’s both expressive and simple. Most languages tend to be one or the other. You have languages like C that are relatively simple to learn, but it takes a lot of code to express what you’re trying to do semantically, and you end up with a lot of incidental boilerplate in the process. At the other end of the spectrum you have languages like Haskell or Scala that let you write very concise code, but the cost is the mental overhead of understanding complex syntax and tons of language rules.
Lisps show that you can have a small language with minimal syntax and simple semantics that can be extremely expressive. Our of all the languages I’ve used over the years, I’ve enjoyed working in Lisp the most. At this point you couldn’t pay me enough to use anything else.
For me, the biggest selling point is that it’s both expressive and simple. Most languages tend to be one or the other. You have languages like C that are relatively simple to learn, but it takes a lot of code to express what you’re trying to do semantically, and you end up with a lot of incidental boilerplate in the process. At the other end of the spectrum you have languages like Haskell or Scala that let you write very concise code, but the cost is the mental overhead of understanding complex syntax and tons of language rules.
Lisps show that you can have a small language with minimal syntax and simple semantics that can be extremely expressive. Our of all the languages I’ve used over the years, I’ve enjoyed working in Lisp the most. At this point you couldn’t pay me enough to use anything else.