Have you ever used parser combinators? They're the absolute best way of parsing anything that I've ever tried. Parsing anything in Python definitely is much worse.
Also, I'd like second the other posters suggestion that most Lisps have many ways of writing imperative code and that it really is no different than your average C-like in that respect.
I'll take another look at parser combinators. I keep hearing people talking about them, but I had never seen them used for anything big. Now that I check again, I see that the ShellCheck lexer/parser in Haskell is written with Parsec, and it seems to do a pretty good job, and has good places to insert error messages and so forth.
Do you have any other examples of a production quality parser done with parser combinators?
The Lisp parser I was thinking about was Julia, which is bootstrapped in femtolisp. It looks like straight imperative code in Lisp to me.
I'm mainly concerned large parsers, like bash, Julia, Ruby, or C. You can write a small parser with any technology. FWIW I have a lot of posts about parsing here, towards the beginning of the blog: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/
EDIT: What's the benefit of parser combinators over recursive descent in Python or say Java? Is it just that it's point-free so you don't have to explicitly pass the input around?
I suppose if I saw the same parser written in parser combinators and recursive descent it would be easy to tell what the benefit is, if any.
Also, I'd like second the other posters suggestion that most Lisps have many ways of writing imperative code and that it really is no different than your average C-like in that respect.