I have always loved Lisp but practically its not easy to hire for or find a job for. In the “normal” realm I have always found ruby to be the closest cousin. There are huge differences but the malleability of ruby is my “hackers dream” and I love using it. Most people only think of it with regards to Rails, but I use it for everything and its a delight.
> I have always loved Lisp but practically its not easy to hire for or find a job for.
No one ever got paid for using Emacs and writing Elisp (except for that single Kickstarter campaign for Magit). You can get paid to write in different languages while still hacking on Lisp dialects for your own satisfaction.
Need to configure a Lua-compatible window manager? Fennel is a great choice. Trying to scrape pages from a website? You can start a Clojurescript REPL and interactively identify elements on the page, "click" on them, "fill out the forms", and finally build a concurrent, async pipeline to sift through hundreds of pages and their content. Need to explore an API? Instead of dealing with JSON directly, you can use Babashka and, interactively, examine the results — slice, dice, group, sort, and filter through them in a way that would be extremely difficult with tools like awk, jq, and others.
Everyone may have their own distinct idea of what defines a "hacker's dream," and often developers gravitate towards tools they find comfortable, often falling into the "everything is a nail" trap. The idea of Lisp, however, with some practice, feels more like a factory for making your own hammers rather than a concrete hammer on its own.
