This is nice. Thanks for the various links and pointers; I dream of the day that I have time to sit back down with Lisp and finally grok the mysteries of the ma

This is nice. Thanks for the various links and pointers; I dream of the day that I have time to sit back down with Lisp and finally grok the mysteries of the macro, and articles like yours will help. Language designers seem to agree that the secret to giving Lisp a bright future is to invent a brand new Language of the Future that just happens to encompass Lisp. This is not exactly a new argument around here, since this very site is written in a FutureLisp candidate. Other aspiring FutureLispers include Guy Steele and Matz (http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html). The thing to recognize is that Lisp's storied history is not an advantage. It's actually a big problem for the language. People like new languages. They're not big yet. You can grasp them. Their core team is young and obscure enough that you have a fighting chance to join it. They haven't accumulated decades' worth of parasitic features. They have no installed base that must be accommodated. Their design flaws are not yet so old that they've been enshrined as advantages. They are not steered by a committee of middle-aged managers. They haven't spawned so many children that you can't decide between them all. The experts haven't yet had the chance to become intimidatingly skilled, let alone entrenched and opinionated, let alone bitter and burnt out. The good news is that each decade's new language is a bit more Lispy than the last. Ruby seems likely to tide me over nicely until it's finally time to jump on the Arc bandwagon.