If you want to have a thriving community around your software and have bazaar-style development process, you better go with mainstream languages (C, C++, Go, Rust, Python, Java, etc.) The community is a great thing as projects like Linux and Kubernetes can show us. Yet there can be situations where you're the single developer on the project, or there are just 2-3 devoted hackers doing all the coding and for a variety of reasons there are little chances of inviting more people to join (niche projects ... closed projects w/o too much funding ... or maybe you're just not a good community builder). From my experience, Common Lisp with all its power is a perfect language for the latter situation. For me, it's also "thinking" language, as you can do exploratory programming easily compared to other modern languages. Source: I've built a control system for industrial electron accelerators using Common Lisp.