Lisp is certainly more elegant than C or C++. The axiomatic nature makes for beautiful programs, and small teams of bright people have had notable successes usi

Lisp is certainly more elegant than C or C++. The axiomatic nature makes for beautiful programs, and small teams of bright people have had notable successes using Lisp. But in practical use, being axiomatic can be an enormous weakness. After all those much-derided committee meetings for C++, there is a standard, and having a standard allows people to collaborate without every team having to invent their own conventions and teach those conventions to everyone they work with. Old style C macros can be seen as an ugly way of providing lisp-like power. One of the problems with macros is people abuse them to do crazy non-standard things, and in doing so make code really opaque to others. So in C, having to invent a custom language to do something is a bug. In Lisp, it's a feature. That distinction has a lot to do with why the world is running so much C and C++ code even though a Lisp is more elegant.