[bidivia]

>how on earth am I going to convince my corpo overlords that this language belongs anywhere near a production system?

Well, I don't see any difference with any other language you could use, from SQL, to C ,CSS or JSON.

The fact is that the higher your corpo overlord, the less is he going to understand your scrawl.

Instead of them understanding your language, it is you who need to speak theirs. You will need to understand MBA talk in order to communicate in simple terms(elevator pitch) why you using this weird language is important for the company.

Then they will leave you alone if what you promised is true, or just fire you if it is not.

[reikonomusha]

This is true. Usually you have to convince your own colleagues, not management. (Obviously everywhere is different though.)

Your senior software engineering colleague who is a huge "Python is the second best at everything" fan will be more of a hindrance than your boss, typically. It's not wholly invalid, but it can easily become a social/political issue rather than a technical one. If someone else is proposing a popular approach (like building a backend in Python), and you're proposing an oddball one (like using Lisp), be prepared for their solution to start off with 50 points of consensus and yours zero.

[hiptobecubic]

Given that so much of building anything new and delivering it in a timeframe that is useful is risk management, I think that's the right place to start. Especially at a company where the risks of Python are mostly known and the risks of lisp are mostly not.