Now would probably be a good time to post a link to my tutorial on how you actually set this thing up:

http://jdpressman.com/2015/11/25/how-to-setup-a-common-lisp-...

I plan to use this for some projects soon, one of which I'm in the middle of right now.

I've used it at 5+ companies (incl. Fortune 500) so far for real, production work. The code bases were sometimes well over 100k LOC.

It may not be a hugely popular choice, but it is used lots in the wild.

There's a ton of COBOL doing most backend stuff. Guess it's a great language. See the problem with your claim?

Far as powerful, most things you need a new compiler for in other languages you can do in LISP with a mere library. And concisely, easily, fast, and sometimes with zero overhead. That property doesn't go both ways. Hence, why LISP is the most powerful or nearly so.

For a lot of engineering projects COBOL probably is (or was) a great language. Programming languages don't exist in a vacuum. They depend on good libraries, tools, teaching materials, communities etc. Whatever the particular merits of Lisp might be, it never crystallized into something that most developers care to reach for. I don't think that means that they're ignorant or stupid.

I agree on the last part. I was only arguing against the popularity = technical superiority claim and for LISP as objectively one of most powerful due to design. People avoid it, plus other superior languages, for all kinds of reasons. Mostly social and economic, though.

I see mostly dump people in real work, they haven't tryed or at least learned the Common Lisp to have their own opinion.

Sure. So what?

If you insist that you know better and aren't trolling, explain why Lisp isn't used in the real world then?

CL is like the scripting languages in capacity and ease of development -- but more. And it is both faster and earlier than the 1990s, when those scripting languages started to grow like weeds. Why did Perl, Ruby, PHP et al eat CLs lunch?

(I've seen explanations that basically boil down to fashion, too many academics and/or fear of different syntax. They seems possible, but hardly a reason why a capable tool was ignored? New things did get big around that time frame -- e.g. OO and testing -- so conservatism... hardly?)

I'm being sarcastic. People that claim Lisp is superior to other languages are the ones that have to explain why nobody uses it.

Personally I think that there are a lot of good ideas in Lisp but most of those good ideas have been absorbed by other languages now and the ones that haven't (s-expr syntax in particular), are perhaps not really such good ideas after all.

Nobody has to explain why nobody uses it.

For one thing, the claim is an exaggeration. Lisp does get used. It gets used enough to keep a small number of Lisp companies alive. Yeah, it's a niche language; so what? People have been claiming it's doomed for over half a century, and in all likelihood will be claiming it's doomed in another half century.

For another thing, the reason people don't use it is obvious: they like something else better. So what? All that matters is that Lisp is a better language for Lisp hackers. It makes them happier and more productive. That has kept Lisp alive. It will probably continue to do so.

Its relative popularity--or lack of it--implies little about its technical merits. Technical merit and popularity are at most tenuously connected.