This is hand-wavy and bordering on woo, also not specific to web development. In my experience, Lisp has this sort of brain amplification power. Whatever weird

This is hand-wavy and bordering on woo, also not specific to web development. In my experience, Lisp has this sort of brain amplification power. Whatever weird idea I have about how to think about a problem, I can kinda smush lisp into shape so it solves that problem. with language X, I have to think about how to I say what I'm thinking in X. It's kinda like spending some time working in C then jumping to python. It's far less hassle to get the idea out there. It's not exactly like that, but it has that flavor. Two sort of related points. Lisp is pretty transparent. If you need to think about pointers and stuff, you can do that and it'll mostly stay out of your way. But if you don't, you don't. Lisp will let you represent whatever crazy notion you have in your head. You may understand why the code works, but explaining to other people can be tough, because your internal abstractions are probably not what other people intuitively think about when looking at the same problem. Not saying any of the above is good or bad. It is different. With java or go or whatever, I tend to think a lot about how do I represent this in java or go or whatever. With lisp it's the closest I've ever gotten tot my idea out there, naked. That can be powerful, or scary, or both. You might take a look at "Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp". That shows a lot of tricky problems tackled in a pretty breezy way. Want to build a computer algebra system? Not that tough to get something working. Work through Norvig's approach and you can get something pretty good working pretty quick.