| I've written a few small CL web applications( with about 100 users active a day), along with a few terminal applications (with only ~10 users). Other languages I know is C , Erlang, Elixir and a bit of python. This will end up sounding a bit evangelical but so be it. I feel that the lisp code was easier to write and reason about, the being able to hot reload code from the repl significantly decreased the time to completion. I also 'connect' to a networked repl when sentry reports an unhandled error to figure out what has gone wrong. You might be tempted to believe that CL repl is "similar enough" to python's repl, however this is NOT the case. Being able to redefine functions, variables and macros while working on the code (without a restart) allows you to deal with errors. The syntax is a 'no brainer', Extreme consistency in function calls means that you don't need to think about it. Other languages which SOMETIMES use infix, sometimes require brackets, that is just crazy. Lisp libraries have less churn than 'modern languages', some libraries have not been touched for some time, unlike python/ruby/js. The code does not seem to rot and old lisp code runs on modern implementations. I work in emacs, lem, I know people who use vscode and alive, and vim. There is no 'hard' requirement to use emacs, you will get by as long as you have 'emacs like' repl integration. All in all, I do not regret working in lisp. It doesn't have the cult of the other languages and I'm fine with that. |
The only other language like that I can think of is smalltalk.