If you check the research on the subject of development speed, it suggests a given programmer generates around a certain number of pages of code in any language

If you check the research on the subject of development speed, it suggests a given programmer generates around a certain number of pages of code in any language he/she is proficient in. And if the programmer learns another language, they will write about the same number of pages when they get proficient. (Apply NaCl. I assume the real statement is that a given programmer generates a given amount of complexity in a work day.) [This paragraph of background was not needed, you seem aware of this point.] You can, simplified, see Lisp as the grandfathers of the scripting languages. (But with parse trees as syntax, efficient compiler decades ago and so on.) The point with the scripting languages is that development speed is so much quicker than e.g. C, for many cases. Lots of less code is needed. Personally, I went to scripting languages from C originally because of that the sheer productivity is so fun. I would have gone Lisp if there were jobs.