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.)