About all this Lisp fuzz
grosales: I think you have a valid analogy of Lisp to Linux, but you you should finish the PG book before you make any final judgment. The power of Lisp comes from its "simplicity", its extensions, and the magical Aha moment you get while coding in Lisp (it's like obtaining zen only to realize new and bigger doors have opened before you and there is a vast ocean of new knowledge to gain) - the Aha moment is rather special, to the point that I don't know how to describe it, that's why you should try to have it yourself. Like other comments have mentioned, Scheme and CL have different purposes (Scheme is mostly used in academia and is very simplistic while CL was geared to enterprises mostly). I really don't know why Lisp flavor wars arise, I suppose is the price we pay for being among passionate people, it can hold back a technology for sure, but if that war can be turned into a logical debate of merits, great things can come out. On that note, I do like Windows 7 a lot, but I will stick to Linux because I have learned so much (shell scripting, network administration, socket programming) ever since I started using it that it's not even funny, and there is some fun in being able to fix something yourself instead of having to report a bug to MS and wait for them to fix it.