Peter Christensen writes about Lisp, startups, and programming, and maintains a well-known list of companies using Lisp.
Commenters cite his Lisp companies list as a standard reference, and link his posts on Hacker News itself and a book review.
There are some good beginner books on Lisp, and there have been several discussions before. Two books come to my mind, PCL and "Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation", both for the Lisp beginner. I have read most of PCL and really liked it. I have just begun to read Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and so far, am really liking it. Both are freely available on the net, so you have nothing to lose to try them out.
PCL - http://gigamonkeys.com/book/
Gentle Intro to Sym Comp - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/index.html
Reference links -
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125766
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/how-to-learn-lisp/
Hope this helps. Good luck!
And... Hacker News. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure pg talked about how Hacker News was, at least initially, REPL-centric (not in those words)
EDIT: http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/are-you-this-agile-paul-graham-changes-hacker-news-while-you-wait/
> This is a step beyond that. I'm not even doing releases; I've been pasting the changes into the running server's repl.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99586
Obviously it's a bit extreme to be hacking on the production site with no version control etc, but HN was a lot smaller back then.
Good call. Michael Ellsberg wrote a book with that same premise. Here's a review: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/education-of-millionaires/ (there's also a link to a related Mixergy interview there)
The book doesn't say how to provide jobs for everyone, for someone who needs a nudge in the right direction it could be very helpful, likely the same sort that would create a site like "IWillMopItUp.com".
yeah but this list was started for CL. At that time we only had http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/, and people giving the same 3 examples. Clojure always had good promotion and it already has https://clojure.org/community/companies
From Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski:
A fair number of large companies do use Lisp for some serious work. A long list of Industrial Lisp projects can be found at http://pchristensen.com/blog/lisp-companies/
Wrote up my thoughts on DM: http://pchristensen.com/blog/articles/meteor-discovered/
tl;dr: A+ tech book that I wish every tech writer would read and take to heart, plus Meteor looks great.