The original paper is here: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-34.pdf http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-34.pdf There are other cases where an orig

The original paper is here: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-34.pdf http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-34.pdf There are other cases where an original Lisp implementation has been rewritten: ViaWeb and Reddit. I think the reason is that the teams which took over the projects were unfamiliar with Lisp. My experience is different, though I should mention that I'm a sole developer. I'm roughly equally experienced in C and Lisp, but find I'm far more productive in Lisp. My first language was FORTRAN. Unlike C, Lisp is memory safe and you don't have to manage the memory yourself, interactive, strongly typed, you never need to write a parser, the built in symbol and list types are incredibly useful, and there are fewer "gotchas". Lisp is multi-paradigm rather than purely functional, so like the Algol derivatives it has loops and destructive assignment.