Heh, funny you learned from the Winston & Horn book - that was my first too. The biggest philosophical problem I have with Lisp (and a lot of dynamically typed

Heh, funny you learned from the Winston & Horn book - that was my first too. The biggest philosophical problem I have with Lisp (and a lot of dynamically typed languages) is the lack of compile time safety-nets (it really bites me when I'm trying to work with a large, distributed team). I miss interfaces/abstract-classes, type checking, etc. I know they aren't necessary - but I'm human and make more than my share of stupid mistakes (and I prefer my mistakes be caught at compile time). Unit testing/etc alleviate the pain to the degree - but it requires a lot of discipline to maintain good coverage. The real trick is that I'm probably faster in Lisp than anything else, but I've met Python and Haskell hackers who are just as fast as I am - so it must be possible to use those languages well (you might argue that they'd be even better in Lisp ;-)).