I was surprised that Common Lisp was not Voldemort. You need something powerful, strange, obsessed with a sort of purity even though it's not so pure itself, and whose name no one dares speak. I guess the C/C++ Voldemort/Snape thing was cool though.

For me, Common Lisp will always be Howl's Moving Castle.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-int...

Common Lisp: maybe an Animagus, like Sirius Black. Or maybe Alastor Maugrey (Mad Eye), who is quite powerful but is not necessarly attractive.

I'd definitely make Lisp Mad-Eye Moody, terse, and complex, but quite powerful.

I like the Sirius Black comparison. Was influential during the previous generation's rise to power but broken promises (A.I. Winter) forced him to scrape by in the background for a while. Nowadays people who know him realize his power, but to most people he is a shady character from the past.

Classical Chinese.

I checked out Mandarin the other day. Just a little syntax. From what little I saw, the syntax does seem to be more elegant than that of Western ones(the ones I know), but it still is a far cry from Scheme level elegance :)

Salamanca Spanish. Of course, there are 30 dialects of Spanish, many of which are incomprehensible, just like lisp.