"Otherwise, the features you mentioned are basically available elsewhere; Visual Basic has closures. C++ has multiple inheritance. Python has multimethods. Ruby has class redefinitions."
Exactly. Common Lisp is close to a superset of the features of other programming languages.
Even in cases where Common Lisp lacks a feature, if it's something that can be expressed by changing syntax, macros can get you pretty close. I remember a thread on comp.lang.lisp where several people had a go at adding pattern matching to Common Lisp, for example, and were able to get a pretty long way towards that goal in a short amount of time. Another example: seems like half of the Lisp books out there present an implementation of Prolog in Lisp.
Exactly. Common Lisp is close to a superset of the features of other programming languages.
Even in cases where Common Lisp lacks a feature, if it's something that can be expressed by changing syntax, macros can get you pretty close. I remember a thread on comp.lang.lisp where several people had a go at adding pattern matching to Common Lisp, for example, and were able to get a pretty long way towards that goal in a short amount of time. Another example: seems like half of the Lisp books out there present an implementation of Prolog in Lisp.