In terms of comparing Forth and Lisp, I was able to pick up a fairly large chunk of postscript (a forth-ish language) and work with it with no prior exposure to

In terms of comparing Forth and Lisp, I was able to pick up a fairly large chunk of postscript (a forth-ish language) and work with it with no prior exposure to forth. I haven't seen any Lisp where that is the case. Generally the lisp I've seen gets far too wrapped up in its own cleverness. My impression is that Forth is a language where things get done, whereas Lisp is a language for basking in your own glory. I have a theory: the amount of hype for a language is inversely proportional to the degree to which people use it to do real work. The same could be said of methodology evangelism. The people actually doing the work don't tend to harp on about it.