Why is common lisp ugly? Many people here suggested common lisp. I was considering it. I like to learn for fun but I am looking for something practical. I will want to build some useful apps in the end with it.
The Lisp that I eventually got into is Clojure. If you're familiar with either Java or JavaScript then that's what I'd advise looking at. The language itself is well designed and elegant and if you understand the platform that it's running on (JVM or JavaScript depending on which variant of Clojure you're using) then that's very helpful. For me, being able to add a dependency on basically any Java library and use it without too much hassle is brilliant but I'd still love the language even if that wasn't the case.
I mean, if Common Lisp is ugly what are Perl and C++ then.
I mean, Common Lisp is perfectly fine. And if you want to use it to write real apps, it's a good choice. Especially if you will have dependencies to manage (see quicklisp).
There's just a few little things that I don't like as much about it.
There's a holy war about "lisp-1 vs lisp-2 (or lisp-n, really)". Not much point in debating that, but scheme is a lisp-1 and CL is a lisp-2.
I like that schemes tend to use #f for false and #t for true, whereas CL just uses nil for false, and for empty-list, and anything else for true (which is usually the symbol t in practice).
I like the way things are named more in Schemes: map vs. mapcar, number? vs. numberp, etc.
I like that the Scheme standards guarantee tail-call-optimization. I believe all popular CL implementations do implement it, but it's not required by the standard.
CL has the ugly loop macro, and Schemes emphasize recursion more (also has `do`, though).
Schemes have "hygienic macros" which I like much more than unhygienic macros.
These things mostly don't matter, honestly. It's all bikeshedding. Lisps and Schemes are very very similar and also very different than most other languages. You can't go wrong with either.
Common Lisp grew by accretion over a fairly long span of time. Consequently, it has varying conventions, inconsistent ways of working, and a whole lot of TMTOWTDI going on.
That said, perhaps we should be careful what kind of house we're in before throwing stones. Exactly the same accusation could be leveled against Java, Python, C++, and Haskell.