Beside the REPL, another impressive feat of Common Lisp is meta-programming. You can write software to write software. Say what? Yeah, that was my initial reaction too, but Common Lisp’s macro system allows you to write functions that return code snippets. It completely redefines the word. Or more accurately, re-redefines, since Lisp is much older than MS Office, which is what most people associate macros with, sadly.

The article could be improved by including an example. Pick one in which Java makes the problem to be solved tedious, verbose, repetitive, or error-prone and where Lisp macros do not. Bias the example as much as possible to a problem where Lisp can shine. It should, however, be a real problem most programmers are likely to face in some form.

Then present the source for both solutions.

This approach would even help those who don't use Java regularly because they could try to implement the same functionality in their language of choice and compare it the the Lisp implementation.

That being said, I write Java for a living, and I don't find it terribly verbose, outside of the lack of sum types, pattern matching, and typeclasses.