One can program in Lisp in an imperative manner very easily and likewise one can program in Python in a functional manner very easily. The big difference betwee

One can program in Lisp in an imperative manner very easily and likewise one can program in Python in a functional manner very easily. The big difference between Lisp and Python (or Ruby) is not the functional nature of Lisp, but rather it's homoiconicity. Re Java, I write CLI programs in Java all the time. It's fine for that, other than the annoying 1 second startup time.