CL has had no real “unknown unknowns” for a very long time. While folks who newly discover it feel they found the gold idol in the jungle cave, the cave is, in truth, well explored, mapped, and documented but the idol is left behind.

All excuses to not use CL have long been, or have had the opportunity to be, addressed. Today, it’s fast enough, small enough, empowered through utilities and libraries enough, has different build and deployment scenarios to work with a vast array of applications. And yet here we are...still.

ABCL runs on the JVM, which runs everywhere on everything. Clojure, first class system on top of the JVM, but no real adoption. Some, to be sure, likely (I have no data) more than CL itself. But it’s still an blip on the radar.

Meanwhile, a bunch of hackers threw together a language sharing many aspects of the core feature set made popular in Lisp and Scheme runtime environments, made it look like an Algol step child with curly braces and everything, and since then an entire ecosystem of software has been written (and rewritten) into this system and it’s runtime is the focus of some of the largest companies in the history of civilization.

Raise your hand if you think that if the creators of JavaScript went with an S-expression syntax instead of a C/Java derivative, we’d be running a VBA clone in our browsers (but nowhere else)?

Because at this juncture, THE thing that distinguishes CL and other Lisps from where we are today, is the syntax. Every other charm these systems enjoyed have been cherry picked away.

Advocates say the syntax is not an issue. It’s a feature m, not a bug. But the “wisdom of the crowds” has spoken, and they stay away.