Why Lisp?
I like the term "Eternal Language" - programming languages where if you write code now - you will be able to compile and use that code ten years from now (a software lifecycle eternity).  Common Lisp, C, C++, Fortran, (edit: Java) are close to eternal languages.  After losing a huge amount of Python 2 code (I wasn't going to rewrite it) I implemented Clasp, a Common Lisp implementation that interoperates with C++ (https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp.git) so that I can write code that will hopefully live longer.I am one of the few software developers with code that I wrote 27 years ago that is still in active use by thousands of computational chemistry researchers (Leap, a frontend for the computational chemistry molecular dynamics package AMBER, implemented in C).