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I've more than once heard that sometimes a few individuals come up with great accomplishments from using Lisp. What are those refering to? What are concrete examples of people using Lisp to create great software or solve complicated problems?

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"...Consider the rich texture of the comments and names in the following code, and how this texture resonates vibrantly against the vigorous nesting of the Lisp code: GNU Emacs terminal.el. This masterpiece of coding profanity sets a standard to which we should all aspire." – gnat Jun 27 '12 at 8:43
@gnat and that quote comes from? – user1249 Jun 27 '12 at 9:24
@ThorbjørnRavnAndersen quote comes from this article: Open Source or Dirty Laundry? – gnat Jun 27 '12 at 9:51
@gnat and how is it relevant here? – user1249 Jun 27 '12 at 10:39
@ThorbjørnRavnAndersen great accomplishment from using Lisp... concrete example of people using Lisp to create great software – gnat Jun 27 '12 at 11:44
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closed as not constructive by gnat, Walter, Eric Wilson, Michael K, Bill the Lizard Jun 27 '12 at 12:54

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The best example I know of is described in this article: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html. The claim is that Lisp boosted productivity thanks to its high level of abstraction: this was one of the secret weapons used by the author's company to beat competing companies. Their start up company did so well that it was eventually bought by Yahoo.

Since I do not have much working experience with Lisp (I only wrote some small examples with it) I cannot confirm this claim, i.e. I do not know if Lisp would allow me to be more productive as it did for the author of the article. However, from the few experiments I did this language does seem quite powerful to me and I would give it a try if I had the opportunity.

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The trick is that you can generate and add new code at runtime. – user1249 Jun 27 '12 at 9:33
This was one of the most inspiring things I've read in my ~10 years of programming life and I believe it not just because it makes sense but because it is synchronizes perfectly with my own thoughts. Thank you. – Dokkat Jun 27 '12 at 9:38

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