Possible Duplicate:
What’s so great about Lisp?
What is it that makes Lisp so special? Why is it repeatedly held up as an example of what a programming language should be?
I've got a pretty deep CS background here, if you need to get technical, by all means do so. Still, I think what I'm asking is how does working with Lisp change the way you see a problem, or the way you see the computer. In what way does Lisp rewire your brain?
“Lisp is a programmable programming language.”
— John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991
Here’s my view:
On the surface, Lisp is a nice, simple functional programming language. There’s almost no syntax, and all the pieces fit together in logical ways.
If you dig a little deeper, read SICP, and write a metacircular evaluator, you discover two things: One, the whole interpreter (given just a few primitives) is just barely a page of code, and two, the relationship between code and data allows for elegant programming techniques.
Once you’ve fully absorbed this, it feels like other languages are set in stone when they only allow you to say a few things. Lisp can build any abstraction at all if you can define syntax and semantics for it.
It's in response to a different question, but this answer seems to get at the heart of this question - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4724/learning-lisp-why/63696#63696
