I love CL and I really miss it when i'm doing something else. I mean, many things are such a pain in 'modern' languages that it's not even funny, when you compare it to the Lisp experience of even decades ago.
There are many cons, but those are simply not as bad as most of the pure technical language/dev env cons in almost everything else. Sure Python & JS have more uptake, more libraries etc, but the experience of developing for them is so much worse. IMHO of course. I have been doing a lot of languages over the years including C#, TS, Py, Hs and more esoteric ones, but I keep coming back to CL (SBCL + emacs + Slime) when I get seriously angry about stuff that is missing or plainly bad in those languages. It makes me relaxed and convinced there is some good in the world after all.
I am currently raising for a product we (foolishly so) bootstrapped in Typescript but now we will, for a launch version, redo it in CL. Meaning I get to work with / in CL (and all of the fun stuff; implementing DSL, code generation, working with macros, implementing a static type solver etc) for the coming 3-5 years before we launch. Lovely.
1) painless debugging with Emacs/Slime vs Rider/VS/VSCode
2) performance & consistency of it; SBCL is fast and remains that way, I can leave emacs/slime running for months and it doesn't degrade; vs/rider... they really burn a hole through my laptop and isn't even that good at most things compared, even on really old computers
3) Re-eval; you can re-eval a region, function, file, last expression etc, during running and/or debugging, which is very flexible ; something wrong, change (or write the same function next to it with a fix; very handy), re-eval and when happy , clean up and save
4) data formats... We have had, since 'forever' had 'proxy' tooling that converts any incoming and outgoing JSON to and from Lisp lists. While in code, we only work with s-expressions and it makes life so easy.
There are many cons, but those are simply not as bad as most of the pure technical language/dev env cons in almost everything else. Sure Python & JS have more uptake, more libraries etc, but the experience of developing for them is so much worse. IMHO of course. I have been doing a lot of languages over the years including C#, TS, Py, Hs and more esoteric ones, but I keep coming back to CL (SBCL + emacs + Slime) when I get seriously angry about stuff that is missing or plainly bad in those languages. It makes me relaxed and convinced there is some good in the world after all.
I am currently raising for a product we (foolishly so) bootstrapped in Typescript but now we will, for a launch version, redo it in CL. Meaning I get to work with / in CL (and all of the fun stuff; implementing DSL, code generation, working with macros, implementing a static type solver etc) for the coming 3-5 years before we launch. Lovely.