[bitwize]

I seem to recall reading an interview with William Gibson in which he said "someday we might have little squishy things that can read any form of physical media you wrap them around". That's what working in Lisp feels like to me. It's something squishy, and you can wrap it around any sort of problem and solve it fairly quickly. Smooth it out enough and it might even be an efficient or elegant solution. I've compared Emacs to a beanbag chair because it too is squishy, comfortable, and once in it it's difficult to leave, nor do you particularly want to.

Languages with nice type systems, like Standard ML or Ada, have the feel of Buckminster Fuller's tensegrity constructs: rigid yet flexible.