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Your brain as well as your entire organism needs external stimulus to function. Food, coffee, oxygen, water. Many of these things affect your brain in obvious and noticable ways: coffee, oxygen. So what's the fundamental difference between substances that are legal and those that governments decided would be too luxury for the people to have freely available?

> I pity those that feel you need drugs to accomplish, because that's just not true.

I pity those who are not questioning the established propagandistic axioms. If you lived in the 15th century you'd never question the theory that the world is flat.

> (a) Very fast development that is enabled by CL (e.g., everything from hash tables to string-operators to memory management is automatically included - there is nothing that is not included).

Name a modern mainstream language that doesn't have these things.

> (b) Excellent programming environments - e.g., parentheses-savvy editor.

You haven't seen XCode, Delphi or MS Visual Studio, where, for example, you can jump to the definition of a symbol with "one click", allow interactive step-by-step debugging with variable watch, disassembly, stack trace, etc - I shouldn't really name all the things that are possible in a typical modern IDE. And I don't know any text editor which is not paren-savvy.

> (c) Excellent compiler, especially with declarations, enables very fast code.

A compiler which doesn't "enable very fast code" has no place under the sun nowadays.

> (d) Excellent system stability with no random crashes at all.

Very exciting, although GC-based languages (i.e. those usually lacking pointers) should not crash at all, or if they do crash that's a shame. Stability and robustness of your compiler and your runtime system shouldn't really be mentioned as a merit. If it doesn't meet stability standards, it shouldn't be released.

> (e) Macros and all that.

Finally getting to the point and you say "and all that"? Btw, "all that" includes unification of code and data - something no other language provides, let's say, idiomatically. This is an amazing feature, and in fact Lisp macros are Lisp macros thanks to just that - unification of code and data and symbolic nature of the language.

But there's a remedy for it and it's simple: the link includes the number of comments in that discussion, so that your browser can change the color if the number of comments has changed since your last visit.

Wrong. Exceptions, unlike GOTOs, can't jump straight into a loop or any construct that has a local state. In fact, exceptions never break local states, and that's their beauty.