I guess many of the complaints are from people trying Lisp on their spare time, especially the cosmetic ones I think (cadadaddr, rplacaca, the parens, etc).

I guess many of the complaints are from people trying Lisp on their spare time, especially the cosmetic ones I think (cadadaddr, rplacaca, the parens, etc). If you have to learn a language for work or school, you just plow through those cosmetic nuisances in a couple of 8- or 16-hour days and get it done with. Maybe once in a while, in an idle moment, you may wonder over your cup of chamomile tea, "did they have to name the filter command 'grep', I mean really?" But you probably are not going to go trolling any internet forum about it. On the other hand, if you are learning a language for your own edification, then Lisp (and C, and the Unix shell, and OLE and Smalltalk and Perl) is forcing you to put up with obnoxious cruft in your own dime, so to speak. Kind of the difference between enterprise and consumer software. If you buy a piece of software (say, a game) for yourself, you are going to be ticked off if it's not perfect. On the other hand, if you buy some software for your company, a few rough edges are OK since you are not paying it from your own pocket.