Comment by mises

I personally am not a big lisper, but know others who are. It's not as cool among young people, but there's a certain segment of those, mostly over 50, who will swear by lisp and build some pretty cool things in it.

1. It's got a minimal core and is easy to implement. This means it runs in many places.

2. Very, very easy to extend due to its treating code as data. You can assemble your own language on top of the base you're given with macros. This is why it's often recommended for building your first compiler. By the time you've written a lisp program, you're basically writing in a different dialect.

I think some people also use it for a challenge, or to make themselves think. It's very different from your normal C programming, or OO, or even other functional languages (even though it influenced many of them). There's a certain family of languages such as lisp, scheme, ocaml, ml, etc. which seem to appeal to those with a more academic bent and so some interesting stuff can be written in them.