And Kapital was an interesting experiment but rightfully died. Smalltalk just wasn't the right environment for something that complex and scale. I'd expect most lisps to suffer in the same way. And TBH it was more the image based model rather than the dynamic language per se though that was an issue.
There's a point where dynamism becomes a liability and Kapital went way beyond that point. Python fares a bit better but still, a huge effort is needed to control its failings at scale. This isn't helped at all by sticking a DAG in the middle of it as was done with Athena and its ilk. This all can be made to work but in the "cos its Turing complete" sense rather than the language helping in any meaningful way.
Source: I suffered through it.
I had to LOL. You have very nicely put into words an experience I bet many have had.
Why? Eg Scheme or even the uglier Common Lisp are quite disciplined. And Clojure ain't too bad either.
As far as I can tell, Lispers don't usually go around monkey-patching things.
That was the official story anyway. A lot of things were claimed when I worked there, a lot of it BS.
The culture in banking was definitely not for me: generally fairly smart people, but very perverse culture. This was the only environment I ever worked where people who actually lie to my face to make sure I made mistake when coding and fail. Everything was custom, and sometimes that meant athena, sometimes that meant terrible systems such as a "distributed database" that was a single threaded wrapper on top of an C++ STL hashmap running on NFS. The guy behind it was reworking its own protocol based on UDP instead of TCP because said system was too slow...
There was 0 abstraction, so if you wanted something such as EUR/USD pair, you had to ask the one guy who knew which id it was, so that you could get the data from in code. To this day I am convinced this was done on purpose for job security.
(I realize Smalltalk is great, but my point is it has its issues as well otherwise I recon sooner or later the advantages would be so clear that Amazon or Google or someone would be all over it since it would give them a competitive edge ...)
Imagine the benefit to the business had they just stuck with Smalltalk the whole time! It is remarkable how many businesses could have been quietly making money for years using a high-quality dynamic language such as Smalltalk or Lisp rather than going through the whole C/C++/Java/Python/Ruby/JavaScript/Go treadmill.
But I guess if they had done that then their programmers might not have gotten to type as many {}! Nor gotten to reinvent the wheel so often.