You caught me -- my "lisp" experience such as it is consists of Scheme and Emacs Lisp. My example may have been inaccurate, but I wouldn't say it is misleading. The point is just that Java expresses the same things in more words (or lines). While writing a function in either language, you spend some time deciding to use a particular approach, then some more typing it in. I'd say the "thinking about it" part takes about the same amount of time for similar things. Then you go to type them in, and the Java one has more lines, but it's probably faster per-line to write. Last time I programmed in Java, I even had a macro for

} catch (IOException e) {
    // Loathe Java
    System.out.println("IO error: " + e);
}
[download]

Which gave me 4 lines (ok, 3 lines) almost for free. Certainly, these 4 lines are much more quickly generated than 4 lines of quasiquoted macro glop in Lisp.

/s

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