>>1Unlucky you. You have an idiot teacher that can't even explain why lisp is so great. Think about this: AI is the hardest problem computer scientists ever need to solve. If a language is good enough to be used for research in AI, it's good enough to solve most any other problem too.
The only problems with lisp are cultural. Many lispers are elitists who don't care for stuff other programmers need, such as distribution of binaries, portability between lisp-implementations, a standard, etc... And most mundane programmers hate lisp because it has lots of silly parentheses.