cough common lisp cough

Sure. Not exactly mainstream so one would need to consider the hiring pipeline, but if it serves as a competitive advantage then sure.

You definitely don't need to consider a hiring pipeline with Common Lisp. 1-2 people are enough to write and maintain it.

But if you prefer 500 devs instead you should consider ruby, python or PHP. Middle managers are getting high on these numbers.

Honestly, that’s just bullshit. Every language is more productive with fewer developers since communication does have an inherent cost. But there is no Silver bullets as per the famous article, no language provides not even 2fold increase in productivity over another managed one, let alone an order.

while I agree a 500 fold increase is a bit of exaggeration, There is some merit to the argument.

more expressive languages including common lisp certainly give more power for an experienced engineer to outperform someone fresh out of univeristy. enough to say that I'd rather have 2-3 senior engineers experienced with common lisp or clojure or haskell over 10-15 juniors working on go or python.

and what if you gave them the same expressive language? I'd argue that its even more dangerous. Common lisp is a powerful language but its easy to code yorself into a corner if you don't have the experience to properly use it. it;d be easy to build overcomplicated systems that are brittle. go is in fact better for them because it limits the damage they can cause.

it was used to write viaweb back in the 90's. The original saas that made Ycombinator possible.

Ok but that still doesn't make it mainstream or have a candidate pool. If those things don't matter then anything goes.

An underrated feature of obscure languages is that they alienate people who think “$tool developer” is a an identity.

Where would the community, mindshare, and hiring pool be? Or would you have to innovate on how you come up with that (on top of your core product) to accomplish anything there?

community is small but extremely dedicated.

I agree that the hiring pool is small but if you want go level performance, metaprogramming and developer productivity, common lisp was your best option.

Shopify went with ruby. not a terrible language but it did come at teh cost of performance.