You know, I did misread what you said. The rest of your post is entirely true. I saw the kind of argument that I'm used to hearing lispers make and overreacted

You know, I did misread what you said. The rest of your post is entirely true. I saw the kind of argument that I'm used to hearing lispers make and overreacted. My issue is I'm not really sure that lisp is actually better at doing things at a lower level. You have more freedom with syntax, sure, but I'm not at all convinced that's the same thing as building things up from the bottom. Rust, for example, will let you do low level things that lisp really can't, and Ocaml will let you build up typologies in ways lisp isn't made to. At the end of the day, languages really aren't that different, especially modern ones, you're mostly working with the same abstractions, and the question becomes is syntactic freedom more important or is a growing community more important? That actually is my biggest issue with lisp (and most other language) evangelism. It's a bunch of claims that aren't really rooted in any kind of evidence.