The article is too long and not that well written. The biggest problem is that, however good the writer they are never going to be able to communicate the power of lisp in prose. It's upto the audience to see it. For those who know lisp, they already know. For those who don't it's like coming in contact with something alien and you can't tell if it solves any problem at all. It's almost as if ones' come in contact with a cult.

Though lisp provides a lot of syntactic flexibility. The beauty of lisp is in giving the programmer confidence that you can create a prototype extremely quickly and then optimize it when needed.

I find the hardest thing in the world is getting started. Once I start its never as hard as I thought it was going to be. In a nutshell, Lisp helps me get started and then lets me get the code ready for prime time.

If you are a web developer, I'd say spend a weekend trying out UCW, write a reddit clone in it. Then try to write it in python. It'll be obvious what lisp has to offer.

I'd start by reading SICP by Sussman and Abelson. Their lectures are available in video. I had a profound experience at the end of lecture 2b where they explain how car, cdr and cons are defined, thus explaining that in lisp, code is data.

The above comes with a warning... Lisp is truely the red pill. Once you've figured it out, you'll find it physically impossible to code in any other language.