I think that this is an unfair criticism; you don't really supply any evidence. (Other than that Lispers are completely oblivious to anything but lisp). ML and

I think that this is an unfair criticism; you don't really supply any evidence. (Other than that Lispers are completely oblivious to anything but lisp). ML and Haskell have certainly surpassed common lisp in some respects, but to say that they have surpassed all lisps in all respects has got to be some sort of sophistry. Lisp is a form of syntax (and a few primitives like Eval and quote) that makes it easy to write programs that manipulate programs. Common Lisp and Lisp 1.5 and Scheme and Clojure all have certain other things in common. However, they have those things in common because they are generally recognized as being good things to have in a language for the purpose of programmer productivity. In no place is it written in stone that to be a Lisp, it must not use Hindley-Milner type inference. I think you'll also find that most Lispers are chronic dabblers in programming languages, to say that I'm sticking my head in the sand when I choose to write whatever-it-is in Clojure is insulting.