Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp
I really think Lisp&#x27;s strength is also its biggest weakness.  It&#x27;s so flexible that it causes massive fragmentation.  Everyone has their own toy interpreter.  There&#x27;s a massive schism between Lisp and Scheme.  Nobody really seems to have rallied around Common Lisp, and thus it&#x27;s not actually very Common in any sense of the word.  On top of that there is no canonical implementation of &quot;Lisp&quot;.<p>Lispers love to say &quot;Lisp is a family of related languages&quot; which is great but daunting to a beginner, and I think also deters people from contributing to the ecosystem, which is where I feel Lisp really falls down.  There&#x27;s just no ecosystem of reliable, standard-ish packages.<p>There&#x27;s Ironclad for crypto, but in the readme it explicitly says not to consider it secure because there are trivial side-channel attacks against arithmetic depending on your implementation (again, fractured ecosystem)<p>There&#x27;s lquery, CLSS, and plump for web scraping, but you can&#x27;t scrape anything modern with them and the author seems to have abandoned the libraries<p>There&#x27;s a GPIO library that simply doesn&#x27;t work<p>Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.<p>Compare that to something like Go or Python, where there are rich, polished, full-featured libraries for nearly every application you can think of.<p>I thought about writing a bot to scrape finance data in Common Lisp, but I didn&#x27;t want to have to write the scraping and DOM traversal logic from scratch. I thought about using Lisp to have my raspberry pi monitor my hobby garden, but the GPIO library doesn&#x27;t work at all and I didn&#x27;t want to write my own.<p>I picked different languages and was immediately productive thanks to wonderful community libraries.