>>Anyone using it, in my experience, was showing off or stroking their ego.
There’s an old computer joke about what people were given to eat while designing languages. COBOL was hamburgers. APL was bread and water. Lisp was tea.
I knew many who adored it, and not for ego. Most people I knew “spoke” tens of languages. Once you got the 2nd one under your belt, the rest just fell out. They loved it for the pared down beauty of the language. They saw it as art.
My husband was one of the most passionate users of the language in the old days.
I never met McCarthy.
I always tell people, once you take compiler design you should be multi-lingual. If you’re not you cheated to pass the course. :)
I never got to use LISP. Right now I’m doing a lot of Groovy, it’s a Java derivative. It’s awesome and very flexible. Used with Grails it’s potent.
-SB