I really think Lisp's strength is also its biggest weakness. It's so flexible that it causes massive fragmentation. Everyone has their own toy interpreter. There's a massive schism between Lisp and Scheme. Nobody really seems to have rallied around Common Lisp, and thus it's not actually very Common in any sense of the word. On top of that there is no canonical implementation of "Lisp".

Lispers love to say "Lisp is a family of related languages" which is great but daunting to a beginner, and I think also deters people from contributing to the ecosystem, which is where I feel Lisp really falls down. There's just no ecosystem of reliable, standard-ish packages.

There's Ironclad for crypto, but in the readme it explicitly says not to consider it secure because there are trivial side-channel attacks against arithmetic depending on your implementation (again, fractured ecosystem)

There's lquery, CLSS, and plump for web scraping, but you can't scrape anything modern with them and the author seems to have abandoned the libraries

There's a GPIO library that simply doesn't work

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Compare that to something like Go or Python, where there are rich, polished, full-featured libraries for nearly every application you can think of.

I thought about writing a bot to scrape finance data in Common Lisp, but I didn't want to have to write the scraping and DOM traversal logic from scratch. I thought about using Lisp to have my raspberry pi monitor my hobby garden, but the GPIO library doesn't work at all and I didn't want to write my own.

I picked different languages and was immediately productive thanks to wonderful community libraries.

I'm not sure what you mean by "no canonical implementation" -- there's the ANSI Common Lisp standard, of which there are multiple implementations. Is this somehow a bad thing to you?

> Lispers love to say "Lisp is a family of related languages"

Not really. I think it's slightly more common for Scheme or Clojure programmers to claim Lisp relations, but it's just advertising. If having s-expression-ish syntax (with nothing being compatible to CL like a real Lisp dialect would be, and was given how much code in pre-CL Lisps could be run in CL unmodified) makes it part of the "Lisp family", then why not speak of the ALGOL family? It's tiresome semantics and from what I've read Common Lispers at least don't tend to do it.

> There's just no ecosystem of reliable, standard-ish packages.

Here's everything on Quicklisp: https://sabracrolleton.github.io/short-descriptions and a curated list: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl

Yes, it's not as impressive as Maven. Yes, not everything is as well-documented as, say, PyGame (http://www.pygame.org/docs/ -- though not every Python library you'll find with pip is, either) or even the Common Lisp Hyperspec (http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/Conte...). Yes, some things are broken, or even abandoned, though in the latter case it may just be that they're "done" pending anyone coming up with a new issue or feature request. I've happily used web scraping libs to save my HN comments with their context, there's a good Twitter API lib I moved to when something broke the Python one I was previously using, I've orchestrated Selenium, I generated some FFI bindings to FMOD and had it working within a few minutes... My point here is just that there is an ecosystem for CL, and many things are reliable, when something works it's rare to stop working. Sorry about your GPIO experience, it happens, I had a bad experience trying to quickload a library that depended on iolib which opaquely depends on a custom C library the author also made and is not in my distro's package manager.

I'm not sure what you mean by "standard-ish" -- is Python's urllib3 "standard-ish"? What about urllib and urllib2? Do they qualify merely by being part of the standard library, or is it something else? My other guess is you mean something like "X is a common area of development in the current year, are there any packages dedicated to that area, what are they, and are they any good?" But this is a shaky categorization and in other languages changes all the time, not worthy of the attribute "standard" or even "standard-ish".

You're right though that what does exist is small and limited, and that's a natural limiting factor to growth, far more I think that what editors are available or easy to use. Quicklisp came about way too late. Yet the ecosystem continues to grow, so maybe you'll be willing to give it another chance in another 10 years.