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I agree, Common Lisp is crufty but really stands the test of time. I have been using Common Lisp since about 1982 and old code still runs fine.

My relative use of Lisp languages: Common Lisp 60%, Racket 20%, Haskell 5%, Clojure 5%, and various other Schemes 10%. Unfortunately since most of my work in the last 8 years has been deep learning, LLMs, LLM chains, etc., I spend a little over half my time now using Python. So it goes...

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That Vonnegut reference at the end ;D

"old code runs fine" is a poor benchmark for how well a language holds up over time. All x86 code still runs fine. Perl 5 is from, I think, 1994. It's still maintained and in development. Most C code from the '80s would still compile and run just fine (at least POSIX-based, Windows however...). You can trivially find Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, and Forth code that all "still runs fine."

I don't think it's a particularly unique or interesting quality, that some old code still runs. After all, I can go to archive.org right now and run all of that ancient DOS, Amiga, whatever code in a 100% exact (or close to) emulator in my browser.

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