Concrete examples? C and Python are prime counterexamples. Neither are particularly "lispy" (although nearly all languages in existence have been influenced a

Concrete examples? C and Python are prime counterexamples. Neither are particularly "lispy" (although nearly all languages in existence have been influenced a little bit by Lisp). And yet they are wildly successful and tremendously well-designed. So either Guido and Dennis Ritchie didn't know lisp and therefore aren't serious language designers (by your second assertion), or they did know lisp and failed to make a lispy language (which would contradict your first assertion). If Guido and Dennis aren't serious language designers, then I'm not sure who are. Except for a specific school of Lex & Yacc languages out of New Jersey, the great majority of professionally designed languages (i.e. by people with an appreciation for formal language design and semantics) have been Lispy and functional; characterized by clean minimal core, well specified semantics, even proven, and self-hosted implementation. I wouldn't read too much into this. There are many more jobs for language designers in academia than there are anywhere else. So it stands to reason that most professionally-designed languages will be of the academic sort (if we can agree that a professional is someone who gets paid for their work). That doesn't imply that those languages are any better than "amateur" languages, only that there's more of them.