Your point is plain to see, and it is correct in principle, but there are plenty of bindings for Lisps too. As far as I understand, making CL talk to Oracle is

Your point is plain to see, and it is correct in principle, but there are plenty of bindings for Lisps too. As far as I understand, making CL talk to Oracle is a battery included in the commercial implementations, or available through CLSQL (and therefore through higher-level libraries built on top of it such as Elephant). Sure, CL may not have all of the latest and greatest, but plenty of languages don't either. While I cannot pretend to approach any sort of "hacker-level" competence in Lisp (I'm not even a programmer really), I have yet to find a relatively trivial task (where my definition of trivial is "included in Python's standard library or a very widely used / de facto standard module", since I'm coming from Python) for which there isn't a usable (and often excellent) Lisp tool. YMMV, of course.