About all this Lisp fuzz
mr_luc: Your questions are reasonable ones given your experiences, but their nature makes it unlikely for people to expend much energy answering them -- questions like "why isn't anyone moving to fix them?" may be perfectly reasonable to you, and inspire eye-rolling in others.Nonetheless, you'd be able to answer most of them if you tried to make a few of your own knock-off programs in lisp. ;) To do that, you'd have to decide on a lisp, installing a few and trying them out, and then decide on a project -- hopefully, something small and manageable. Perhaps a visual "hello, world" program. Or a code-golf exercise. My personal "hello, world" for learning a new language is usually a basic 1D cellular automata.Once you've written your hello world, you'll have answered many of your questions. Next, rewrite it! Is your code idiomatic? What are some common idioms, and why do they exist? Could you make it shorter?Next, extend it. Can you use it from the web? What would it take? What about letting people customize your helloworld? etc etc. See what it feels like to develop in the new language, even though the entire "project" cycle could conceivably be done in a single day. (Disclaimer: not by me. It takes me, at least, two months of part-time hacking to feel affection for a language).After that kind of a learning process -- which isn't terribly onerous; it's the sort of thing you end up doing with almost any interesting language -- you'll look back at these questions and laugh.And, if you aren't willing to go through that sort of "learning lite", why bother asking the questions?( If you're looking for enlightenment about the process of actually using Lisp, in book form, I recommend Practical Common Lisp, which is available as a free pdf ).