“It’s the macros, Stupid!” Seriously. Macros have to be understood a priori to be readable. Macros make the cognitive load of the language very heavy. Contras

“It’s the macros, Stupid!” Seriously. Macros have to be understood a priori to be readable. Macros make the cognitive load of the language very heavy. Contrast that to Ruby which can do rich DSL without macros. It’s much easier to read and figure out even when it gets complicated. Lisp is a beautiful language. But it hits a wall. Macros were made to hop that wall, but ultimately hurt the language. I think this can be fixed with pattern matching and perhaps types, but it will take a very smart programmer to pull it off and it will take Lisp in a direction that old die hards are probably uncomfortable with.