One of the things that hurts Lisp is that there isn't one Lisp, but several competing dialects. Common Lisp tries to be the standard one, but I find it rather hard to like, and would rather use something like Clojure. Unfortunately, they differ even on the basics. Lisp has CAR and CDR, while Clojure has "first" and "rest", so even basic list processing code can't be reused verbatim.