"Please don't call me a weed." Sorry :( "You point out that the more effort you expend, the better you get. The problem is the rate of reward. Getting a produ

"Please don't call me a weed." Sorry :( "You point out that the more effort you expend, the better you get. The problem is the rate of reward. Getting a productive lisp environment is hard work. Competing implementations, sometimes-compatible libraries, very little documentation -- these are things that make lisp, holistically, hard to adopt. Every other production language makes it easier to get to the programming. I can't think of a worse-supported production language than lisp." I agree. "Also, the benefits you mention are either not that uncommon, or that valuable. The only thing lisp has as a unique feature is it's macro system, thanks to it's syntax. It's the only thing that can't be adapted straight into another language. Otherwise, the features you mentioned are basically available elsewhere; Visual Basic has closures. C++ has multiple inheritance. Python has multimethods. Ruby has class redefinitions." Well, it's uncommon and valuable to have all of them in a coherent language. Especially since they're pretty orthogonal features that complement eachother well. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. "The thing is, I wanted to believe. I stocked up my library with PCL, SICP, the little schemer, and On Lisp. I learned emacs. I stuggled with asdf. What I found, though, did not seem to live up to the promise of a hidden pearl." I'm sorry that you've come to the conclusion lisp is not right for you. Maybe in a couple years you can try again and most implementation/library/documentation/etc issues will be resolved?