I found CL really nice. One nice feature about SBCL is it can be incredibly fast. Sure, not as fast as raw C, but it approaches it. (This is useful when you're

I found CL really nice. One nice feature about SBCL is it can be incredibly fast. Sure, not as fast as raw C, but it approaches it. (This is useful when you're using CL as your IR.) The macros were the big win for me with this. I have only a few macros, but without them, the code would be significantly uglier. The entire builtin-generator is a big giant macro, and it was very nice to define my own little DSL to build commands. (fun story: I originally started developing this as a Python interpreter, and abandoned it because (a) it was far too slow, and (b) it was difficult to build a clean, abstract, method of writing builtins) Other than the macros, the other big win was how easy it is to generate lisp code. There's no string munging, just (cons 'add cmds) and you're done. There are some things I don't like about it. I think Scheme has it right with functions and variables sharing one namespace. I find the common lisp (defun something (a) (map #'square (funcall a))) much uglier than the scheme equivalent of (define (something fn) (map square (fn))) but that's purely cosmetic.