[reikonomusha]

Style is not essential to getting things done, but it's essential to building a community and having labor be multiplicative in its impact. Lisp is a language ripe for expressing a personal style, and that's antithetical to collaboration in a variety of ways. It can be managed, if the community can rally around a common set of principles.

I likewise have written Common Lisp for decades. But I also get paid to do it, manage a team that does it, and see immense value in doing these extra things that hackers don't much care for, such as:

- making Lisp compatible with other languages through ABIs

- developing stylistic guidelines

- developing systems for static typing in Lisp to assist long-term development and maintenance of Lisp code

- etc.

So does style or the lack of any of the aforementioned bullets "block" the ability to "get things done"? Strictly speaking, no, but it inhibits outside interest in your project.

[hollerith]

> Lisp is a language ripe for expressing a personal style, and that's antithetical to collaboration in a variety of ways.

I concede that point. Also, I'm the only user of most or all of the Lisp I've written over the last 40 years.