[nikofeyn]

of course they're different. i didn't say or imply otherwise. the original parent mentioned both racket and common lisp, again different languages, so it was clear they weren't looking just for common lisp and were more generally wanting for some lisp or scheme type of job. and i was asking a legitimate and honest question, as i see ABCL to be a much more esoteric and hard sell than clojure to a place heavy on java development.

[klibertp]

You asked, "why would one use [ABCL]?" What I implied in my response (sorry for not stating it directly) was that one may prefer the particular feature set of CL over Clojure's.

As for being a hard sell - my personal experience is that if you're in a position that allows you to choose your implementation language, in most cases you can choose Brainfuck and nobody will care. As an example, I introduced F#, Erlang, Elixir and a bit of Prolog to a Python shop that way: all that mattered in these cases was whether the code worked, and it did, so no one complained. The Erlang microservice actually outlived the project it was written for by a year and a half.

On the other hand (still, in my experience) if you're not in a position where you can choose your language you're basically screwed, and should stop trying to convince your team to switch to something else. You have almost no chance of succeeding and a high chance of disrupting teamwork by pushing your opinions on others.

So I was thinking about the former situation, where you have some degree of freedom of choice and can decide the language on technical merits alone.