I agree with much of what you've said but every language is not inferior to Lisp. I would say Haskell is on par (in some ways superior). The way I rate the po

I agree with much of what you've said but every language is not inferior to Lisp. I would say Haskell is on par (in some ways superior). The way I rate the power of a language is based on how many "patterns" you need when using it. For example, I find Smalltalk an extremely powerful language but it does have one weakness: dispatching on more than one type requires a pattern (e.g. double dispatch, visitor, etc.). CLOS doesn't have this limitation. But Lisp does have a pattern that Haskell doesn't have: delayed evaluation. Every time you need it you have to reach for a closure or a macro and each of these have design side effects (e.g. macros can't be used as first class functions). Haskell doesn't have this problem because delayed evaluation is how the language works by default.