Pico Lisp can be viewed from two different aspects: As a general purpose programming language, and a dedicated application server framework.

As a programming language, Pico Lisp provides a 1-to-1 mapping of a clean and powerful Lisp derivate, to a simple and efficient virtual machine. It supports persistent objects as a first class data type, resulting in a database system of Entity/Relation classes and a Prolog-like query language tightly integrated into the system.

As an application server framework, Pico Lisp provides for database management (including multi-user synchronization, DB garbage collection journalling and replication), web interface integrated (and generated from) the application data model, and an application server.