I can't speak from a professional level about this, but I'll tell you why I started using Common Lisp for my personal development. One day I was thinking it wo

I can't speak from a professional level about this, but I'll tell you why I started using Common Lisp for my personal development. One day I was thinking it would be awesome if someone created a really powerful language with great facilities for abstraction: first class functions, objects, meta objects, etc. It should use dynamic typing during development with an excellent REPL and a built in debugger available everywhere, but it should have the ability to add type declarations when the code got more settled. Even better, this language should include ways of hinting to the compiler how to make a chunk of code faster, and if that wasn't enough, you should be able to replace chunks of code seamlessly with highly optimized C code. I thought about how to implement a language like this for a while, but when I looked into it I discovered Common Lisp does most of this already. It's static typing isn't perfect, though now there is https://coalton-lang.github.io/ https://coalton-lang.github.io/ if that's your thing. So that did it for me, but really this is only part of what you can do with Common Lisp. I think it still has a niche in places where the "right thing" isn't know yet. For example, I read a Reddit post saying that Common Lisp would be a poor choice now for a web startup, and that Paul Graham overstates Common Lisp's case as the reason for Viaweb's success. This is probably true in 2022, but I think it's instructive to look at why Paul claimed Lisp was so helpful back in 1996. There was no Rails or Django, no React or single page web apps. Viaweb built Scheme style continuations onto Common Lisp to simulate an SPA before AJAX was a thing, and on top of that created a slick HTML templating language based off lisp macros. To do that in Perl, or C, would have required something like writing a scheme interpreter, and would have taken much longer for a 2 person team. Is that a 100x advantage? Hard to say. Ultimately, I do think it still has advantages, you just have to find the areas where nothing else will really do the job.