The main feature Go was missing that took away most of the usefulness of writing a Lisp in it was FFI. If you can't dynamically get identifiers (constants, functions, variables) by a string at runtime, you lose most of the interesting desktop possibilities. It's probably still useful as a server-side language but Lisps seem the most useful in the GUI space.
Also it says this in the author's latest blog post:
> "Yes, there are a lot of parens, but that is a small price to pay for a language that is capable of morphing itself into nearly anything you need it to be. And the way that Lisp does that is with a macro system that puts #define to shame!"
I'm convinced this is not the real benefit of a Lisp. The only thing macros can do that functions can't is hide control flow. And 99% of the time that's a bad thing that library authors should not use. It could be used to make other language features such as concurrency, but that's a slippery slope.
The real benefit of macros in my opinion is a balanced syntax that makes things like Emacs + paredit possible, which increases your productivity like 5x-10x. It's on another level, definitely worth trying for a few months if you work with a Lisp already. But I don't see any other real value in Lisp's syntax or in macros.
Also it says this in the author's latest blog post:
> "Yes, there are a lot of parens, but that is a small price to pay for a language that is capable of morphing itself into nearly anything you need it to be. And the way that Lisp does that is with a macro system that puts #define to shame!"
I'm convinced this is not the real benefit of a Lisp. The only thing macros can do that functions can't is hide control flow. And 99% of the time that's a bad thing that library authors should not use. It could be used to make other language features such as concurrency, but that's a slippery slope.
The real benefit of macros in my opinion is a balanced syntax that makes things like Emacs + paredit possible, which increases your productivity like 5x-10x. It's on another level, definitely worth trying for a few months if you work with a Lisp already. But I don't see any other real value in Lisp's syntax or in macros.