[DrJokepu]

Writing unmaintainable crap is really the fault of the programmer, not the language, isn't it? You can write unmaintainable stuff in any language and I think Lisp is particularly good at helping the developer keeping the code clean and easily readable (despite it being very powerful so it's easy to do very stupid things, I must admit that.)

[WilliamLP]

It's easy to do very stupid things, which at the time seem brilliant, and you don't realize they're stupid until they're so intertwined with the rest of the project that they're harder to fix than to just deal with.

[thunk]

Good point. But you can't reach the simplifying insight by any other road than your own initial stupidity. It's the way you learn Lisp. At least Lisp breaks you with grace -- quick and painful. Most other languages spare you the pain of insight.

And I'm consistently surprised by how easy it is to root out my stupidities once I've recognized them, thanks to the repl, a functional style and a small code base. Lisp teaches you to face your fears.

[DrJokepu]

What I mean, a novice programmer would do that in any language anyway (and I'm no exception) while an experienced developer would avoid these traps in any language.