my fav is Emacs Lisp.

Because it is practical. More or less the most widely used lisp today.

Considered as a tool, it has probably some 10 times more users than
either Common Lisp or Scheme Lisp.

For example, i consider emacs lisp, more powerful than Perl, as a text
processing language, for 2 major reasons: (1) It has buffer datatype
and associated datatypes such as point, marker, region, etc.. Which is
more powerful than treating text as inert chars and lines, which Perl,
Python, Ruby, etc do. (2) elisp's integrated nature with emacs. This
means, for odd text manipulation jobs that happens daily in every
software coding, i can write text processing programs that interact
with me while i edit.

The above paragraph, details why i love emacs lisp. However, it is not
so much about lisp language's nature. I find nothing in particular of
lisp lang's features of emacs lisp that made me love emacs lisp, other
than it being a functional language. It's more about how it happens
that emacs has a embedded lang and that happens to be a lisp. It is
not difficult to have another language, or a new editor with a embeded
lang that functions similar to emacs, or a editor with a engine that
supports multiple langs. However, emacs just happens to be almost the
only one, or the most prominent one. (i am a expert in Microsoft Word
in early 1990s, and although i haven't ventured into its Visual Basic,
but i know it can do scripting. I'm sure, now after almost 20 years,
and with Microsoft's “.NET”, it possibly might compete with emacs with
its elisp, but i know nothing about it to comment further. (i'd very
much welcome any comment from someone who are a expert of scripting
Microsoft Word with Visual Basic; on how it compares to emacs, if at
all. (if you don't have say 1 year of full-time experience in this,
please spare me your motherfucking drivel)))

As to the reason i am not a fan of the 2 other major lisps: Common
Lisp and Scheme Lisp. These 2, are little used in the industry. Common
Lisp is a moribund dinosaur. Scheme Lisp is little used and is
confined to Academia. There is nothing in these 2 langs that i
consider elegant or powerful today. I would, in a blink of a eye,
consider Mathematica, OCaml, Haskell, erlang, far more elegant or
powerful.

I would like to see Common Lisp and or Scheme Lisp die a miserable,
horrid, deaths, due to fanaticism as exhibited by Common Lisp and
Scheme Lisp regulars in newsgroups. I consider these 2 langs not only
impractical and inelegant, but their people are the hog of any
possible progress of lisp in general.

See also:

• Language, Purity, Cult, and Deception
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/lang_purity_cult_deception.html

I do consider lisp, or the lisp way, a lang with lisp characteristics,
can be the most beautiful, elegant language. (in fact, i consider
Mathematica being one such example) However, given the social milieu
of the 3 major lisp communities: Common Lisp, Scheme Lisp, Emacs Lisp,
it might happen when pigs fly.

--------------

Of the existing lisps, especially new ones, i support NewLisp, and i
also support Clojure. Personally, i'm not likely to invest time in
them in the next 5 years, if ever. Second to these, i mildly support
Qi.

I was a avid fan of functional programing, and was a big fan of lisp
too. Lisp, even just 10 years ago, was still a great language, almost
the only one that are much better than all others, in both practical
industry use and also academic theoretical considerations. But due to
the rapid development of software technologies and vast number of lang
today that happened in the past decade, including a profusion of
quality functional langs, i see little point in lisp.

See also:

• Proliferation of Computing Languages
http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/new_langs.html

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄