Lisp projects also tend to keep the dependency list short. In the best case scenario, once the foundation is laid and the project has momentum, you end up with

Lisp projects also tend to keep the dependency list short. In the best case scenario, once the foundation is laid and the project has momentum, you end up with what feels like a language finely tuned to express solutions to problems in your domain. In other languages, you may reuse useful routines but it's not as powerful. Additionally, as the dependencies are added the interactions between them can become a real headache. What's interesting to me is that for some problems Lisp feels like a cheat code and it goes exactly the way I just described. For other problems it feels like a weird old language with a lot of parens. Perhaps I'm just not good enough at Lisp though.