>>23 The programmer of an application doesn't write HTML in lisp-languages. They don't use templates either. They don't generally deal with unicode transformations, and they don't worry so much about such low-level things.

Did you understand that?

A Python programmer has to be aware that the unicode text transformation occurs transparently and automatically and you need to remember to normalize and sanitize your inputs. A PHP programmer has to be aware of the various ini-file magicks and to be dilligent to make sure your HTML tags balance.

A lisp programmer doesn't do these things. The people complaining about <table> and unicode think that because they deal with these things every day that they need to deal with them. They don't; their programming language is just stupid. Lisp is better because you can make it less stupid.

Take tables for example: You emit effectless semantics with div and class and then "pretty those things up". That prettying up takes time away from buildin your app. Using tables gives you your app faster, and you can still "pretty those things up".

Or take unicode: When someone posts a unicode string, why do you care that it's unicode? You're either going to save it, display it, or ignore it. You only care if it's going to cause special effects so simply escape it and move on. You need to elipsize it? Make a utf8_elipse function. You don't need the language to automatically transform unicode for you in order to deal with unicode strings.

A lisp programmer writes these things if they need to. If it comes up twice, they macro it. If it comes up zero times, they don't bother.