True. But the Lisp programmer would reply that you need the things only Lisp can do in most non-trivial programs.

If you don't need the things that only Lisp can do, there's not as much of a reason to use it.

This is not an unreasonable thing to say, yet I'm skeptical. The problem is that a lot of the things that are natural to do in language X just wouldn't occur to you in language Y. I think this is a big problem with the way people compare programming languages. I've been meaning to write a post about it sometime.

Not that I completely agree with the GP's point.

No you can't. In fact, that's precisely what you can't do.

(Unless you're talking about writing a Lisp interpreter... but then your Lisp programs themselves would still be written in Lisp.)

No, but close. They were designing a language for other people who did. The original intention with Dylan was to create a Lisp that was made more accessible for mainstream programmers.

Ditto Guy Steele on Java: "we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

I didn't know that Dylan was considered a LFM rather than a LFSP by its creators, but I do know that at least of them gets s-expressions and still thinks they're a bad idea. See Dave Moon's suggestion: http://www.archub.org/arcsug.txt