The major advantages are extreme modularity and conciseness - you can write much shorter expressions than competing languages, like C, Python, Java etc. Macros

The major advantages are extreme modularity and conciseness - you can write much shorter expressions than competing languages, like C, Python, Java etc. Macros are another big feature, which allow you to generate code easily and lastly the ease with which you can write self-modifying code (Homoiconic code) is often praised. Here are some more good answers to that question in a Stackexchange thread http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9320/why-is-lisp-useful http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9320/why-is-l.... edit: another one - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2036244/whats-so-great-about-lisp http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2036244/whats-so-great-ab...