Those are definitely some interesting ideas, but I'm uncertain to what extent they're actually true. I think that Common Lisp really does make choices for its

Those are definitely some interesting ideas, but I'm uncertain to what extent they're actually true. I think that Common Lisp really does make choices for its programmers, and asks that they develop in a fashion such that their code can easily live with others (notably, the places where it doesn't — e.g. the common readtable — are nowadays regarded as mistakes). One of my several issues with Scheme is that historically it has made so few choices ('you have lists — develop whatever data structures you need!' & 'you have call/cc — develop whatever control structures you need!'). But that's a problem of Scheme (less so, in recent years), not of Lisp or the closely-related (to Scheme) Racket. There is definitely something to be said about how easy it is to get things done in Lisp: 'Making Scheme object-oriented is a sophomore homework assignment. On the other hand, adding object orientation to C requires the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup' (from The Lisp Curse).