Oh I see by Ugly you mean practical. Lisp is about Metaprogramming not referential transparency. On the otherhand once you start diving in the source code of Cl

Oh I see by Ugly you mean practical. Lisp is about Metaprogramming not referential transparency. On the otherhand once you start diving in the source code of Clojure you quickly find yourself looking at javaclasses ime. On the other hand CL has CLOS, an object system which puts others to shame. And reader macros to define your own syntax. See cl-annot to see the decorator syntax from python being ported to CL or how to give hashmaps Ruby syntax [1]. [1]: http://frank.kank.net/essays/hash.html http://frank.kank.net/essays/hash.html