The average dev has never taken a look at a lispy language and so cannot hate it. For the ones being hesitant to dip their toes in it, how can they really hate,

The average dev has never taken a look at a lispy language and so cannot hate it. For the ones being hesitant to dip their toes in it, how can they really hate, what they do not know? It seems more like not being interest, than "hating" it, where "it" is the essence of such a language. Macros, DSLs, well, of course you can abuse then, like anything else in computer programming. However, there are many examples of how they can be used in a great way. Look at some Racket macro things like typed Racket for example. Or look at pipelining operators. Or timing. Or memoization. All these are very well usable and there is no problem with using them in a team. Well written macros allow taking cool features from other languages to your Scheme dialect of choice. Emacs is still well liked. I recommend you get on the mailing list and read a few weeks about how varied its usage is. Very active mailing list. Libraries of lower quality? Even "much lower"? Where is your source for that? Not sure which specific ecosystem you have looked at, but that experience is completely different from mine. Aside from the fact, that I can usually solve the problems by just using Guile features, Scheme and SRFIs, not even needing an external library, there are very clever people active in the ecosystems of lispy languages (including GNU Guile) and FP languages, outputting high quality code, often going beyond what some mainstream language library does, while using good abstractions to do so. It is important, that languages like GNU Guile, which implement interesting and powerful concepts, continue to attract people, who want to learn more than the mainstream fad and improve the status quo. It is a great journey of learning, which I recommend to any software developer looking to widen their horizon and to improve their skill.