1) "Ruby is a denser functional language than Lisp" Lisp is a regular, explicit language. It does not strive for micro-density, but rather tends to achieve ma

1) "Ruby is a denser functional language than Lisp" Lisp is a regular, explicit language. It does not strive for micro-density, but rather tends to achieve macro-density by allowing more expressive abstraction and transformation in the larger componentry of your projects. Its regularity around parenthetical s-expressions is the source of its expressive power. Things like "(+ (aref x 3) 4)" are larger than "x[3]+4", but the operations and source code representation in Lisp are directly accessible to matching and transformation without having to go through extra rigmarole to deal with classes of AST node objects or whatever. This makes the usefulness of these features immediately accessible for everybody, and useful for quick utility, not just major undertakings. 2) "Ruby gives you about 80% of what you want from macros" I'm sorry, but this section is simply ignorant of what Lisp macros are for. Simple syntactic sugar is obviously possible with macros, but certainly not its major use. Providing abstract constructs that require custom code generation, creating lower-level boilerplate (like auto-creation of introspective data structures and customized support functions), and wrapping custom behavior around inline scopes are the primary uses I've seen and used. Ruby can do a little of it, but I see no "80% of what you want" there. 3) "Ruby's libraries, community, and momentum are good" Quicklisp was created after this article was written, and has been a godsend to the community. Lisp tends to develop a very roll-your-own culture because of its quick accessibility of creating abstractions, but the ease at which you can publish & reach for libraries with QL has brought a lot of cultural shift towards reuse. There are a ton of both esoteric and practical libraries out there, and common libraries for threading, networking, OS interaction, etc, are the common case now (and actually have been for quite a while before Quicklisp as well). There's tons of interoperating flexibility because the language provides a huge baseline (especially its object system), so it doesn't all need to lock into an on-top-of-Lisp infrastructure that would constrain the programmer's options. It's a good time to be in Common Lisp.