[itistoday]

> We are dealing with "poky" high level languages like Ruby and Python because a lot of us find Lisp, Smalltalk and Self horrendous to work with.

I think that's the main problem. There are lots of "Lisps" out there besides Common Lisp (which is what most people think of when they hear "lisp"). I.e. Scheme, newLISP, and Clojure come to mind.

Pick one of those three Lisps and learn it, you'll be wondering why anyone in their right mind would consider writing in any other language, unless it was a lisp. As someone once said, there's a reason people become Lisp zealots; just take a look at it.