Don't forget about the landing fuel you have to tote with you along your whole trip. That is not trivial weight.

Well, capitalists are always going to want to draw a harder line between the source code and other client code.
Mostly to support some business model, but also for performance: note that even GNU Emacs, in all of its glory, compiles a significant amount of the grungy code down to native binary, for performance reasons.

You make these assertions about "terrible language" -- what is it about the design goals of SQL you don't like?
and
"just not designed for object persistence" -- do you mean all of the overhead of normalizing data and casting it to canonical data types, as opposed to just dumping it to some key/value store a-la MongoDB?
I mean, sure, there is no universal tool that scales from a boot image to a data center. Yes, fanbois are tedious. But, other than PHP, I can find a little something to love in just about anything.

Right, but the point about the Lisp interpreter is that wandering back and forth across the line between the source code and the live data (mostly impossible with other systems) is readily attainable with Lisp.

Can you name one? I suppose the recent bit about "enforcing my will through legislation" is about as close as you're going to come, for all one doesn't feel the need to excuse supporting "2 + 2 =4" as an expression, either.

You can't assert that without denying free will, at which point your cheep materialistic reduction eats itself: in what context can the question of morality even ARISE, if we're all merely bags o' meat?
No, I don't think my excuse-fu even holds a candle to yours, sir.

In Soviet Russia Bing searches you!

We can theorize much, but upon what basis?

Which is another way to state my point about the unity of (code . data)
But I think that point is substantially a theoretical one; I write VBA code that generates VBA code all the time. Sure, I may not be able to execute it cleanly in one fell swoop, but you'll notice that MSOffice has orders of magnitude more market penetration than Lisp.

This project will achieve the first 66% outright, then fanny about ad in-fanny-itum on government subsidies to ivory towers near you, workin' hard, strivin' to get the other 9% nailed down.
Beside the white collar welfare, of course, this will help keep those academics and the stunnedents whose minds they poison voting correctly.
Sweet, sweet descent into oblivion!

And so what cheap excuses have I offered to God for my sins?

Sweet, sweet Progress!

NSFW => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4NChe56s9E

It seems that, as with regular expressions, the acme of skill is limiting the problem.

Well, certainly not mine. I'm no less a thug than any other.

Couldn't agree less. The only thing one is born with is an awesome capacity to rationalize.