I recently was asked why I like Lisp. For me, it boils down to the fact that Lisp makes it easy to control when your code is evaluated. Most languages only let you evaluate code at runtime. There are ways around this (C++ templates, cpp, code generation, etc.), but they all have severe limitations. In contrast, Lisp makes it easy to run actual Lisp code at compile time (macros) or even read time (reader macros). Combine that with the fact that Lisp code is pretty easy to manipulate with Lisp itself, and it becomes much easier to do things that are usually restricted to language developers, which can be quite a force multiplier. Just to illustrate, most of the language features that C# has over Java (LINQ, properties, closures, lambda syntax, yield return etc.) could be added to Java by 'ordinary developers' if Java somehow had these things I like so much about Lisp.

But it doesn't...

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