A couple comments: > I dislike this notion that Lisp (or Haskell or OCaml or ...) owe it to everyone else to explain and enunciate why it can be more productiv

A couple comments: > I dislike this notion that Lisp (or Haskell or OCaml or ...) owe it to everyone else to explain and enunciate why it can be more productive to use Lisp. There are a couple reasons why I think this happens. The first is that people who use Lisp (or any other technology) will rightfully get excited about using it. Sometimes this translates into trying to evangelize it to other people, which is not a bad thing. The second reason is that Lisp has a long history of 1) incubating major contributions to the field and 2) being continually marginalized by commercial practice. In many cases, this marginalization is warranted... there have been many good reasons not to use the language. In that kind of environment, it's easy to see enthusiastic users of Lisp getting a little defensive and writing apologetics about their tooling. > What the hell is an X-pression? He describes it, in some detail, directly in his post. > Opportunities to participate. ... Nothing to do with Lisp again. I do think this is an area where Lisp has unique advantages. Good Lisp systems tend to have good online documentation, good access to the underlying source code, and good interactive facilities for modifying a system. Just as an illustration, I tend to think that Emacs couldn't really work as a closed source software package, and I don't think it would be nearly as powerful as it is with a different language than Emacs Lisp. (Eclipse is also open source, written in a very different language, and not nearly as easy to extend as Emacs.)