I have felt the "sense of enlightenment" referenced in two languages: Common Lisp and Elixir. Not two distinct senses, but the same sense, twice. I've also code

I have felt the "sense of enlightenment" referenced in two languages: Common Lisp and Elixir. Not two distinct senses, but the same sense, twice. I've also coded productively in Scheme and Clojure without feeling the same sense. Watch someone like Notch code in Java; it's possible to achieve it without whatever language feature people think is essential. However, if it's easier to achieve in Lisp, then Lisp will always have value. The enlightenment isn't essential for application development, but it points the gun away from your foot surprisingly often.