re: 3. I can't speak for anyone else, but some of the most productive research coding I have done was in lisp. I do think it is difficult to work in large tea

re: 3. I can't speak for anyone else, but some of the most productive research coding I have done was in lisp. I do think it is difficult to work in large teams with lisps, their flexibility becomes a barrier to communication. The enterprise model of "100s of programmmers, all fungible" isn't quite right anywhere, but it really spectacularly falls apart in an environment like lisp. I do think lisps are amongst, if not the, most productive languages for one programmer (or a very small team that works well together) to do novel, exploratory programming. This fits really well in some types of research. On the other hand, if a lot of what you want to do is basically glue - lisp doesn't buy you too much. For example, I don't thing python is a very productive language, but it is a very productive ecosystem - if that makes sense. Far more so that lisp(s) today for many problem domains. If you really want to start something basically from scratch, it's still a very good match. But if you are going to spend a lot of time building 70-80% solutions for problems that in another environment would be one include away ... maybe you won't be so fast.