[smegsicle]

when i first heard that lisp was supposed to be good for making DSLs, my first thought was 'gross, i'll just stick to writing plain lisp thankyouverymuch'

but i think that's a misunderstanding- it's not a suggestion to make a mess with reader macros or whatever, its an observation that common lisp _naturally_ builds up to form the language constructs needed in your domain, simply by virtue of providing the tools and syntactic flexibility needed to construct them

another thing that seems to put off newcomers to cl is the parallax between the promise of a smooth, polished dev environment, vs the nuts-and-bolts-exposed nature of the core language itself (eg the infamous eq/eql/equal/equalp situation)- but i think this can be explained as how cl is _not_ a scripting language, and you are expected to paper over these edges as you define the system

cl gives you the best tools in the business to turn itself into a dev interface so clean it might as well be a DSL