[adamddev1]

I think the big thing is that Lisp is (aside from mutable variable assignment) basically all declarative, rather than the imperative paradigm.

Even without static types, and even allowing macro craziness, there's just such a stronger baseline of declarative and functional thinking, you're off to such a good start in clearer thinking and reasoning about a program.

[ludston]

This is just not true. The Lisp family contains all conceivable variants of languages, from statically typed Coalton, to dynamically typed Scheme. From functional, immutable by default Clojure to the imperative-style of Common Lisp.

There are prologs, constraint solvers, ffis, JavaScript alternatives, garbage collected and not garbage collected languages that call themselves lisps.

[agumonkey]

I won't disagree but most books and people who made lisp in the early decades were somehow hinting at not manipulating state but trying to represent ideas and operators to raise the level of expressiveness without shooting yourself in the foot (as much as possible)

[enfield-argent]

I think this depends on the Lisp, no? AFAIK Common Lisp supports a lot of imperative style programming--besides all the mutation/assignment functions, there's the `prog` macro that lets you use goto, `do`/`do*` to iterate over groups of statements, or even the `loop` macro. OTOH the Scheme-style Lisps are much more declarative thanks to TCO and a community that prefers the functional/declarative programming style.

But again, I suppose all the Lisp forms return values, and quibbling about the declarative : imperative :: expressions : statements mapping is just petty semantics

[lgas]

> But again, I suppose all the Lisp forms return values, and quibbling about the declarative : imperative :: expressions : statements mapping is just petty semantics

I would argue that it's very much not just semantics, or at the very least it's certainly not petty. The distinction has a noticeable effect on what the experience of writing code and on the reliability and related properties of the written code.

[frwrfwrfeefwf]

Yes and also how you use it. The more you squeeze performance out of CL the closer the code looks to C in s-expression format, the less you squeeze it the more it looks like a DSL. The bridge between the two is macros so that you can have both the performance and expressiveness.