People probably just thought you missed the biggest differences. None of your three would come to mind if someone asked me the main differences of CL and Python

People probably just thought you missed the biggest differences. None of your three would come to mind if someone asked me the main differences of CL and Python (especially real multi-threading considering it's not in the standard even if bordeaux-threads works everywhere) and I'm not close to being a CL expert. I might get to 'performance' eventually if I had to list a bunch. If you 'let people discover the truth' then you get a person who reads a couple chapters of SICP when they're 16, thinks they know Lisp, dismisses it as a cool idea language but not practical (compared to the more familiar and productive Python, Java, PHP..), and maybe just maybe ~10 years later they see an example like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222404 and say "I never knew Lisp, what have I missed out on?" But they could have been told what they were missing out on in the beginning! "Condescending Smug Lisp Weenies" may be Lisp Enemy #1, but I think Enemy #2, not far behind, is probably "People who think they know Lisp, but actually don't, write it off due to incorrect assumptions". That said, I do think there's a certain something common to Lisp and Python that draws people to use both. e.g. Norvig. I think his page at https://norvig.com/python-lisp.html https://norvig.com/python-lisp.html is a pretty balanced comparison.