Rather, the abstractions that C offers are considered more "natural" than
  those offered by the extended Lisp family.

| I think maybe Paul Graham is right when he says: a language created by a
| committee is never a good language (or something similar).

  I think Paul Graham is /fundamentally/ clueless about the construction of
  large systems.  His desire to go back to basics to design Arc is a symptom
  of the intelligent, but socially immature hacker who thinks he knows things
  better than most people and /therefore/ think that other people are wrong,
  making sure there is a community consensus behind decisions and that you
  have to accomodate more than one person to make something succeed.  Some
  people succeed in making communities -- Perl and C++ and Java come to mind
  -- and some people fail miserably because they think too much in "my way or
  no way" terms.

| Paul Graham is doing this, just go to his site (www.paulgraham.com) to learn
| about "Arc".

  He is just another disgruntled Lisper who disrespects everybody who thinks
  different from himself.  The announcement of "Arc" destroyed much of my
  respect for Paul Graham as an authority.

| But then why not reinvent Lisp? See above.

  Because you end up worse than what we already have.

  How come people with the most misguided political ideas believe revolution
  is the answer and people with reasonable political ideas manage to succeed
  in slowly transforming their society to their liking?  Please think about it.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway