[nnq]

Is "Beating the Averages" still relevant in 2019?

I see it pretty high up on the site, and I thought the consensus is that nowadays most languages have enough lispy and functional features to give similar productivity.

Is there any benefit from hyperflexible languages high enough to outweigh the benefits of readily available libraries?

[brlewis]

It's hard to do reproducible experiments measuring productivity, but my personal opinion is it's still relevant. I say that as someone doing mostly JavaScript and TypeScript development day by day. I often miss the clean syntax and macro facilities of Scheme. I used to use Kawa Scheme a lot, which runs on the JVM, so readily available libraries were never a problem.

Libraries, documentation and community are reasons to use non-Lisp languages for certain projects, but if you don't have some kind of Lisp in your toolbox, you're still missing out in 2019, in my opinion.