Right now, Denzel's points are spot on. I would add Go the compiler itself is something of a footgun. It routinely compiles things it shouldn't. Go vet is the b

Right now, Denzel's points are spot on. I would add Go the compiler itself is something of a footgun. It routinely compiles things it shouldn't. Go vet is the bandaid on this. Common Lisp's biggest footgun is probably its lack of opinion about anything. It's truly multiparadigm and probably not in a good way. Alan Kay: "Lisp is not a language, it's a building material." A real world example: I had beers with the SIFT guys (a local AI consultancy here in Minneapolis) a couple of years ago. They explained to me that when they have a problem, they go and type text in an editor that explains the problem formally. Then they type words in that problem's "language" that allows them to express a solution. Then they go an implement that language they just came up with using Common Lisp. Clojure on the other hand is a Lisp with an opinion: parallelism can be done in the same idiom as non-concurrent logic if you use immutable constructs. So the language will push you in this direction. It turns out writing code without branches, variables, objects and yes even state can be done 99% of the time this way. And yes it is simpler in the truest sense of the word.