Comment by kleiba
15 years ago
Not all professional programmers are college kids with degrees in C.S. Imperative languages are much easier to get your head around than OO-languages if you don't have a formal training. And lispy abstractions like map and first order functions are even trickier. So I thought it's natural that the more abstract a language, the more difficult it is for it to make it into the corporate world.
There's nothing preventing you from writing imperative code in Lisp.
That's true but if you want to learn Lisp (anything) well you will have to see examples, talk with peers etc. Everyone discourages too much imperative code in Lisp so this will be very hard to pick up on your own. So to be an effective Lisp-learner you will have to grok map, first order functions and what not.
Common Lisp is both imperative and object-oriented, with one of the most powerful OO systems out there (CLOS). It's a lot less oriented towards functional programming than things like Scala, Haskell, or even Clojure, which is probably more used than CL in the modern "corporate world".