Kind of funny that people in the embedded area use C, which has a very weak type system and the result of using C is usually unsafe (no matter how programmers try) - even though its supposed to be compiled with static type checking.

> "It takes a macro to write a decent loop?"

That's the usual way to introduce a LOOP. As most Lisp implementations are written in Lisp, most syntactic constructs are macros anyway - whether they are at the language or the user level. For many Lisp systems there is really no distinction between both.

> Dropping into a debugger is not an acceptable bug-handling strategy in my world.

For embedded programming Lisp can have a lot of problems:

* lack of compile time safety

* the need for Garbage Collection

* no low-level machine types

* more...

Since the nature of 'embedded' is changing, some of that might no longer be such a big problem. In some areas 'embedded' systems are suddenly actually full-blown connected computers.