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I knew Lisp and nothing else until I learned Python and Java years later, and the only reason I've missed statically typed code after finding out what it is is that optimizing Lisp is rough. Improving the algorithms is fast in Lisp, but time and space improvements that involve type declarations are IMO poorly documented.

But for a 6000-mile road trip? Are you kidding? That's when Lisp shines brightest because of macros. If you get 3 or 4 Lisp programmers together and none of them has ADD (on second thought, this may not be possible) you'll get that project done much faster and better than you would otherwise. Because of functional programming, bugs will be easy to deal with, too.

I would speculate that, with regard to development time as a function of complexity, Lisp is O(n) whereas other languages are O(n^2) or worse.




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