LISP is indeed a 'real language' used for 'real programming'. Comercially successful does not equal 'real'. Not that LISP hasn't ever been comerially successful (
http://www.paulgraham.com/).
I must say I have severe doubts about C++ and it's template ever becoming anything approaching 'easy' or 'pretty'. It's just too grotesquely complicated at this point that I have much hope it will recover. Programming languages are a form of communication and C++ makes that communication so much harder than it really should be, programming really is hard enough anyways. A primary design goal of C++ was that you don't pay in performance for features you don't use. It has mostly succeded with this. But you certainly do pay in cognitive load, the ammount of stuff you need to be aware of to correctly utilize operator overloading is astounding.
But I disgress, you might have noticed I'm not much of a C++ fan and that I tend to lash out at it whenever I get the chance. I really don't hate it that much, I just think that it's overused by a few 100% (there are projects using it for good reasons) and it makes me sad that so many people equate C++ (or maybe Java) and 'real programming'.
