Learn Lisp the Hard Way
Before there were tens of thousands of open source developers across a dozen or so language ecosystems using collaborative source control and the hard won, but sometimes forgotten, wisdom of decades of internet systems development; we had to build so much more of our stack ourselves.  It was much less about finding the appropriate &quot;libraries&quot; or &quot;frameworks&quot; -- their were not that many to even choose from.<p>You would have to build the layers of your stack from first-principals, or perhaps second-hand mimicry of third hand descriptions.  Understanding your problem, and building exactly the tool needed is a very different approach from picking the tool with the momentum, growing developer base, checklist of features, and knobs to twiddle to somehow get something approaching a solution to your problem.<p>In that setting, Common Lisp has a very powerful feature set; macros, CLOS, interactive debugging with restarts, dynamic redefinition and a fast runtime made to be interactively modified.  It is a few days work to make a minimalist ORM, a HTML template language, or a functional query language and engine and proceed to tune it for purpose.<p>I think we are approaching an inflection point.  The software ecosystem complexity, and the specialization of developers into frontend, backend, or specific frameworks and the absolutely unfathomable and delicate chains of transitive trust in the layers and layers of abstraction will become a liability .<p>Doing &quot;more&quot; of the same, throwing more bodies at it, rewriting the world because your UI or ORM needs a reboot, trying to attach checksums and technical proxies for dependencies as a substitute for the basic fact that you need to know what code you are running and why to be a responsible software vendor; none of this will work.<p>Truly powerful languages and runtimes with appropriate technology fit for purpose are the way out of this conundrum and the best path to being a responsible and effective computer programmer.<p>Keep your parens sharp.