The idea of Lisp is that there is no strict difference between programmer who uses language and compiler writer. If you program bottom up style, you extend the

The idea of Lisp is that there is no strict difference between programmer who uses language and compiler writer. If you program bottom up style, you extend the language towards the problem you are solving. You have meta-object system, macros, compiler-macros etc. Only the hardware specific back-end is not available to the developer. Programming frameworks, language extensions (Qt,GWT,..) and their programming conventions are all attempts to build up language towards the problem. Often they would benefit from having parser and compiler, but get buy by relying on programming conventions (object relational mapping frameworks for example) and massive amounts of xml or json configuration files. Ideally Lisp is like ball of mud - you can throw anything you want into it, and it's still Lisp. You are programmer framework configurator.