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Comment by mratzloff | Hacker News Reader

For personal use, sure. For anything else, language choice requires bottom-up campaigning or top-down mandates--Lisp never even enters the conversation, at least in any serious way. Language choice is also heavily dependent on mature third-party libraries, which are in abundance in many languages but not as much with Lisp dialects (unfortunately).

Ruby and JavaScript have adopted enough Lisp concepts and in a lot of organizations enjoy enough support that pushing for real Lisp is a touch quixotic.

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I get the impression that Clojure is at least entering the conversation in some places. Some companies that need concurrency control capabilities that they find difficult to implement in Java are starting to use Clojure, or at least considering using Clojure to make certain Java business applications threadsafe. The fact that Clojure runs on the JVM and can be called from inside a Java application makes this easy to do, but in a bottom-up campaigning situation the hard part is convincing management to sign off on your use of the language as an "approved tool."

We use Clojure at twitter and I believe that google supports CL as part of the after-effects of buying ITA. At the time I wrote this, clojure didn't exist and ITA was not particularly well-known.

Yes, Clojure is the exception. From an institutional standpoint, its support derives entirely from the fact that it runs on the JVM (as you pointed out) and can talk to both the company's existing Java code and the vast pool of Java libraries out there.

The lesson here is that it was incredibly smart for adoption to target the JVM and CLR. The JVM in particular will almost certainly outlive Java itself as a primary development language.

Ruby and JavaScript have adopted enough Lisp concepts and in a lot of organizations enjoy enough support that pushing for real Lisp is a touch quixotic.

Alternately, JS and Ruby may have served to loosen people's resistance to useful and interesting language features that are better implemented in, say, CL. Writing either makes me sad, in an "uncanny valley" sort of way.

My point is languages are chosen at organizations based on practical reasons like libraries, employee skill set, and potential employee skill set--not language features.

Language features are a practical reason as well. They are force multipliers. But to understand that one has to understand the features, which understandably doesn't happen at the organizational level, thus that factor doesn't enter the equation.

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