LISP has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer.” I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
— Edsger Dijkstra.
LISP was the world’s first elegant language, in the sense that it provided a parsimonious base with rich possibilities for extension. LISP has been applied mainly to problems of symbolic manipulation and artificial intelligence, partly because manipulating symbols is so easy in LISP, and partly because AI programmers tend to be lazy and undisciplined, like pilots who refuse to file a flight plan before taking off, and LISP’s interactive structure allows them to get away with this.
Eugene Charniak, Drew V. McDermott, James R. Meehan, Artificial Intelligence Programming, Psychology Press, 1987 [1980].