I’ve looked a bit at the original reddit code (it is/was published on GitHub) it does a lot of things in unusual ways for a lisp project and I’m not too surprised that they abandoned it: I’m pretty sure that if they had rewritten it in lisp, taking advantage of what they learned, the second version would have worked as well as the Python rewrite.

Also, quicklisp didn’t exist/wasn’t as widely used then: I’ve done all sorts of Lisp projects now and never had serious issues finding good libraries for standard web development tasks.

Didn't they also had to deal with wanting to use threaded architecture while simultaneously deciding to run on less supported platform (FreeBSD)?

What would you use instead if you had to choose a Lisp based language today?

Clojure?

Or a non-lisp language instead?