I've found, as a Lisper, that the secret to being effective and valuable to a company such that you're both irreplaceable and not too much of a drag on the rest of the organization is to pick secret weapons that have slightly more overlap with the normal world than Lisp.

Clojure, Nim, Elixir, and more faintly flirt with the true unbridled power of a CL environment, but primarily provide useful abstractions and some familiarity, compatibility, and/or killer features that can't be turned down as easily as a true CL environment. It works out, when the company is small enough that you're driving your own project. Just be sure do document what you did.

What do you like about Nim? I've started playing with it and it's quite comfy but I don't know much about it's capabilities yet.

cb321

Nim is terse yet general and can be made even more so with effort. E.g., You can gin up a little framework that is even more terse than awk yet statically typed and trivially convertible to run much faster like https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/rp.md

You can statically introspect code to then generate related/translated ASTs to create nearly frictionless helper facilities like https://github.com/c-blake/cligen .

You can do all of this without any real run-time speed sacrifices, depending upon the level of effort you put in / your expertise. Since it generates C/C++ or Javascript you get all the abilities of backend compilers almost out of the box, like profile-guided-optimization or for JS JIT compilation.

EDIT: There really is much more, as with any system - I was just trying to give a flavor of what appeals to me.