Interesting point. Particularly I believe that the 'coding' part isn't the real job, I'm not just an overpaid typist. So why is concise expression good? For th

Interesting point. Particularly I believe that the 'coding' part isn't the real job, I'm not just an overpaid typist. So why is concise expression good? For the record, I am NOT a day-to-day Lisp programmer, but I've played with it a little and read about it some. I think it's because its about expressing your problem clearly. It's not "20 times less lines" so much as it is "20 times clearer expression". Not that it's exactly 20x, but it seems better. When you express things more clearly, and structure your code more like your problem, and less like your programming language, you shed a lot of accidental complexity ( See Out of the Tarpit - http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf ), so managing the complexity of your project is easier, which means fixing bugs and adding new features is also easier. I think this is the route being implied when they say you can develop features faster. I'm not so certain you'd see the benefit in a particular feature, but over time. Note that a lot of the modern languages are picking up many of these expressive features, closing the gap there as well, which is wonderful.