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by pavelludiq 5482 days ago
I recently began working on a web app in common lisp(hunchentoot, restas, postmodern). I chose lisp because:

* I love lisp. I admit that as long as i can't find a reason NOT to use it, i will.

* Me and my partner still don't know exactly what we want to do. We have a few ideas, but both of us are pretty inexperienced, both technically and business wise. Common lisp is excellent for experimentation and many people have had success using it to fill in the gaps in their knowledge about a certain domain. My next couple of weeks will consist of just building "stuff".

* I don't understand what other advantage does a full stack framework have, except that it made a bunch of choices for you(ORM,template engine, structure of your program). If I were to write an app in python, i might be tempted to use something like flask(or some other "micro-framework"). I like the idea of hooking together different libraries, rather than filling in the blanks of a full stack framework.

Basically I've found no reason not to use lisp, if you know it. Don't let the reddit story scare you, things have changed TREMENDOUSLY in the past several years.

Now there are a lot of common lisp success stories, i made the time to search for them(I'm not about to invest my entire summer in something without learning from others first :D). Check out mahmud's comments here on HN, for some of his experience, to cite just one example. Search, don't just ask. This this thread is mostly identical to at least 3 others I read in the past week while reading old threads about lisp and web development.

Another excellent lisp is clojure, and people have been using it for web apps to great success as well. I chose common lisp over it, because I prefer multi-paradigm languages over ones with stronger accents(whether its OOP or FP). But clojure is still my second favorite language, and if you're into FP, check it out.