I could see the unreasonable effectiveness of a Lisp (CL or Scheme) beginning with the elegance and programmability that comes from being based on the lambda ca

I could see the unreasonable effectiveness of a Lisp (CL or Scheme) beginning with the elegance and programmability that comes from being based on the lambda calculus. But to me it feels like the power of CL comes from having acquired a variety of features that can exactly solve day-to-day problems and edge cases. Take the condition system: it first struck me as weird and unnecessarily complicated until I encountered the use-case that conditions exactly solve. I think that comes from engineers using the language being the same engineers who can add features to the language. It's an extreme form of dog-fooding. It's like a beautiful mathematical core that grew a lot of scar-tissue to handle wordly edge cases. EDIT: because I used Slack formatting, not Hackernews formatting.