" There's always a dozen incompatible solutions, and it's never clear which one should be used." Welcome to software. While your other sentiment seems logical

" There's always a dozen incompatible solutions, and it's never clear which one should be used." Welcome to software. While your other sentiment seems logical, if you actually look at it as a lisp practitioner, you'll find the answers to the questions you have relatively easy. You don't have to "update" the language, for many things you can just use it like any other. The problem isn't that lisp isn't updated, but that there aren't enough of us to build the lisp django, or at least there aren't enough of us who want the lisp django for it to happen, so thats why web development in lisp is limited to using raw hunchentoot or microframeworks like Restas and Caveman/Clack(which are both pretty awesome btw). Other than a few minor tweaks, lisp really doesn't need updating. More/better libraries would be sufficient! Can you give a couple of specific examples where you think lisp is behind the times and you are "forced" to implement whatever. I can think of maybe a handful of such instances(there isn't a really great STM, but we do have other awesome concurrency options as just one example), but the list of lisp features I miss in python(my day job) is 1-2 dozens at least(and If I had macros and CLOS I could probably half that list in a week or two :) In other words if you are crazy enough to use lisp for useful projects, the language will help you, maybe you haven't tried? Maybe you have and just had bad luck. Some domains(GUI programming for example) aren't as well supported for example. Others are pretty ok.