All of your points are fair, convincing and well-taken. I'm (much much) softer on lisp than my somewhat aggressive reply would imply; Scheme, Clojure and Common

All of your points are fair, convincing and well-taken. I'm (much much) softer on lisp than my somewhat aggressive reply would imply; Scheme, Clojure and Common Lisp (in that order, according to me) are all amazing languages that contributed significantly to PL design and implementation. Racket in particular is extremly high up the list, with its amazing "Language As A Library" attitude that shocks and excites me very much. What gets me is just the smug attitude of "Hehe, look at all those uncultured masses developing in a language other than our lord and savior. <shouts loudly> We were there since 1960, swines <shakes fists>." When I say that lisp is "not special", I don't mean it's bland or uninteresting in the sense of Java-The-Language (not the VM), that would be a contradiction since I already acknowledged the uniqueness of the condition system and the Image-Based tools, and the interestingness (but not uniqueness) of macros and CLOS. I just mean it in the "not specially special" sense, i.e. it's not any more special than Erlang, Smalltalk, Haskell, OCaml, Perl, or any of the dozen or so languages that led the way in the development of new abstractions and ways of expression. It's a bit like saying "Greece isn't special" or "India isn't special" to a modern nationalist of those countries who think that their civilizations are unmatched. Yes, Greece and India are very special cultures who invented fantastic things and led the way in many ways, but so is Egypt, Iraq, China, Western Europe, Russia, US, etc... While you're perfectly fine being proud of things you love ("Smalltalk invented OOP!", "Erlang invented concurrency!"), denigrating other things and implying that they're posers who can't possibly match the thing you like despite their "reinvention" is off course something that will get people riled up and understandably aggressive.