I said this in another thread too, but the problem with Lisp is that it's sorta bundled with Emacs, so if you want to use LISP's powerful REPL you really have no choice other than learning Emacs. Essentially, Lisp is not just a "language"; it's a whole system designed to explore programming ideas. It includes the IDE, the minimal syntax, REPL, compiler, etc. All of this together makes "Lisp" the powerful and enlightening tool that people talk about.<p>I think the other "inconveniences" of Lisp could be more tolerable for beginners if learning the language didn't require learning a new IDE (or OS, depending on how you define Emacs!). But at that point you'd have to forego a major benefit of using Lisp (its REPL); you'd be back to writing "dead" programs, not image-based "live" ones.<p>Another problem I've faced with Lisp is lack of good documentation (except for Racket, but then again, Racket doesn't have Common Lisp's powerful REPL). Every website that teaches Lisp is in ugly HTML+CSS-only style, compare that to the more user-friendly websites of other languages.<p>Then there's the issue of up-to-date learning material. Aside from the fact that there are very few resources to learn Lisp, the ones that are available are too old too. "Practical Common Lisp" (2005), "Common Lisp Recipes" (2015), "ANSI Common Lisp" (1995), etc.<p>I like the philosophy of (s-exp) but modern lisps have ruined its simplicity for me by introducing additional bracket notations [like this]. It's confusing for me as a beginner to distinguish between (this) and [that], and honestly goes against the whole idea of "code and data look the same" motto.