I agree with you, although I do a fair amount of personal scripting in lisp to make me more productive at work. But for things like that, I could just as easily use Python, and Python is more readily accepted by other developers at my company.
It's no use pretending otherwise, "what's with all the parenthesis?" is still a major roadblock to acceptance.
At my office, it has nothing to do with parenthesis and everything to do with the fact that a new person can be pointed to http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ and told to get started. Done. They can learn it all on their own.
In all these lamentations about LISP not being top-dog I never see anyone point to a tutorial to bootstrap a project for a beginner.
And once you finally arrive at the destination, there isn't a complete set of documentation. The project actually looks pretty cool, but how could I rationalise trying to learn off a set of incomplete docs? Or recommending it in a professional environment?
EDIT: And looking over the comments here, the only links offsite is someone complaining about pricing and someone else offering up some git projects where someone is currently translating a project into english. Pretty fucking pompous to say non-Lispers are scared of parens.
Sure, common lisp is not the best language for "connect the dots" style web development, but people are using it to write webapps. If you don't know the language, and you're ignorant of the options and tools, you will not be spoon-fed. If you need a way to glue a bunch of ready made components without spending too much time learning your tools and environment, python|ruby IS the better choice.
But of course web development might not be a sufficiently hard problem for CL to yield a significant benefit over python. Also, combining them is also an option, write your hard stuff in CL, let your less experienced programmers write the web interface in Django. Its a matter of what works for you, i guess.
You've already declared web frameworks below Lisps's station. I'm not sure you can help me. Obviously the problems I want a language to help me solve are no concern of yours.
The truth is that anyone smart enough to use C++ for real work is certainly smart enough to use Lisp, and they don't, and it would be worth figuring out why. It's definitely not the syntax.
Not to mention that ViaWeb is a website... Was that not sufficiently hard a problem?
"EDIT: And looking over the comments here, the only links offsite is someone complaining about pricing and someone else offering up some git projects where someone is currently translating a project into english. Pretty fucking pompous to say non-Lispers are scared of parens."
Please can the attitude.
Not everyone speaks English as their first language. The RESTAS documentation is well-written and the translation is high quality (I helped proof-read it).
If you have trouble using github, there are help pages for that. If you think "github isn't friendly to newbies," too bad, because you will need to use git if you want to write software.
If you wanted links to tutorials about Common Lisp, you can ask for them. But if you really wanted those (and not just to troll HN), you would have asked already. Like that guy who asked for documentation for RESTAS and received links to the documentation and several example projects.
It's no use pretending otherwise, "what's with all the parenthesis?" is still a major roadblock to acceptance.
Sigh. One might imagine a similar objection such as "what's with all the significant whitespace", but apparently that shocks people less than a few parentheses.
I wish more developers would see radically unfamiliar syntax as an opportunity to discover ideas they might be missing out on.
It's no use pretending otherwise, "what's with all the parenthesis?" is still a major roadblock to acceptance.