Keep in mind that this essay was written in the early 1990s. Today there are many programming languages available that offer features that are unavailable in C

Keep in mind that this essay was written in the early 1990s. Today there are many programming languages available that offer features that are unavailable in C but have long been available in Lisp. This was not the case in the 1980s during the AI boom of that era. There was a large chasm between classic procedural languages (C, Fortran, Pascal, Simula) and dynamic languages (Smalltalk and Lisp). Prolog was a popular alternative to Lisp in AI circles, especially in Japan back when it was pursuing the Fifth Generation Computing Project. When looking at the language landscape in the 1980s in the context of AI, it makes sense that practitioners would gravitate toward Lisp and Prolog. Today we benefit from having a variety of languages, each with tradeoffs regarding how their expressiveness matches the problem at hand and also the strength of its ecosystem (e.g., tools, libraries, community resources, etc.). I still think Lisp has advantages, particularly when it comes to its malleability through its syntax, its macro support, and the metaobject protocol. As a Lisp fan who codes occasionally in Scheme and Common Lisp, I don’t always grab a Lisp when it’s time to code. Sometimes my language choices are predetermined by the ecosystem I’m using or by my team. I also think strongly-typed functional programming languages like Standard ML and Haskell are quite useful in some situations. I think the strength of Lisp is best seen in situations where flexibility and have malleable infrastructure is highly desirable.