To a man with a Haskell all the world is a nail...and every nail has a type and requires a special hamner. I.e.:

    (define side-effect (cons print "This is not an IO monad"))

    (define its-already-generic (cons number->string 4))

The more I think about Lisp the more I believe that the best reference language is C. [1] Lisp took form as a first step away from assembly, not a first step toward the singularity. What is garbage collection but some lazy programner automating memory management?

The mistake is to take the ideological fanaticism of Lispheads for ideological purity of the language. There is none. Even the great schism of Lisp1 versus Lisp is rooted largely in arguments from precedent...and precedent for Lisp is largely that it can shave a few precious bytes and register loads by allowing a single symbol to point to more things.

[1] Or Cobol.