Re: "My salary has never been well correlated with my productivity." I'm thinking more from the owner's perspective. If they hired a bunch of Lisp programmers,

Re: "My salary has never been well correlated with my productivity." I'm thinking more from the owner's perspective. If they hired a bunch of Lisp programmers, then they'd produce more software with fewer programmers (if the productivity claims were correct). They'd then get rich and expand, and other companies would take notice and copy. Re: "I know a company here that uses Clojure and most new hires have to learn it on the job. From what I've heard, nobody has a problem with it." There seem to be niches were it works out well, but it has stayed niches since the invention of Lisp. After 50+ years of not catching on in the mainstream, you have to wonder about real-world market fit. Re: "I find C (and imperative languages in general) harder to write and debug." C is a relatively low-level language, mostly designed for hardware speed instead of programmer speed. Thus, it's not the best specimen of imperative languages to compare with. But in general such seems to be subjective: people give widely varying anecdotes. Those who like Lisp dialects gravitate toward them and those who don't go elsewhere.