Shinmera is a Common Lisp developer who writes about the game Kandria, porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch, and Portacle.
HN commenters cite it as proof that Common Lisp works for real games, and link its posts on Kandria's development and the Switch port.
You asked where Lisp is useful, and I supplied a list of companies that find (or, in some cases of recent history, found) Lisp useful. Your Google example is pertinent, because Google had the resources to wholesale eliminate its use of Lisp any time within the last 15 years, but for some reason worth pondering, hasn't. Instead, they continue to develop the product in Lisp, and continue to contribute to the Common Lisp open-source ecosystem.
But that aside, if you want a fresh look at what people are thinking about with Lisp, maybe check out the talks that were given this year at the 2025 European Lisp Symposium [1,2]. Or perhaps look at how someone shipped a platformer game on Steam with Common Lisp [3,4], and is in the finishing lap porting it to the Nintendo Switch [5].
I realize, though, that this kind of "debate" (?) is never satisfying to the instigator. If it does satisfy though, I will agree with you that—despite all of the claims of alleged productivity and power the language offers—Common Lisp remains far less popular than Python, which I assume is your only real point here.
[1] A presentation about how adding a static type system to Common Lisp à la Haskell helps write mission critical programs in defense and quantum computing: https://youtu.be/of92m4XNgrM
[2] A talk from employees of Keepit, a company that supplies a SaaS backup service, discussed how they train people on Common Lisp when employing them: https://youtu.be/UCxy1tvsjMs?t=66m51s
[3] Discusses…
Honestly, I can't do anything but put blame for this on people like Paul Graham.
Some people come to Lisp and expect to discover a magic wand to abolish all blub languages that was prophecised by the legendary almighty Lisp Prophet, and they rush out to seek it.
Then they realize that Lisp is just another programming language equivalent to all others by means of Turing completeness, with particular features, strengths and weaknesses they feel cheated and disenchanted, and go wing our their frustrations by means of articles like that.
Which is directly why articles like Baggers' happen.
The question is: why do people actually consider Lisp to be the Holy Grail By Which All ALGOL-Like Languages Must/Shall/Will Die? And the answer that instantly comes to my mind is all the unfair PR people like Graham give it. Calling Lisp a magical all-fixing wand is all fun and games until someone actually believes in it (who wouldn't believe The Y-Combinator Guy? after all), and then discovers that the reality doesn't really look that straightforward, and writing Lisp doesn't suddenly mean that you get to do less work than you'd otherwise do. As pointed out in Shinmera's response, https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/370 :
I believe Lisp allows me to be quicker about developing these tools than other languages, but making an actual game would be even quicker if I didn't have to make most of these tools in the first place.
What do you mean by 'fully'? I mean, with a lot of hard work, sweat, and cursing that comes with making any large game, not to mention a game engine and various support infrastructure too, there's at least one existence proof that they're at least 'working': https://kandria.com/ (How much cursing has been done at Windows vs SBCL vs OpenGL vs various libraries, only Shinmera knows. You might like a recent overview he wrote up of some of the development: https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/413 When things work well enough that "build with wine" is a viable strategy, that's pretty well in my book.)
> However I'm starting to think that scripting languages are a false economy. There is no intrinsic reason you can't have a concise and easy to use language that can be quickly (in debug mode) compiled to the metal and dynamically linked to the project.
This might interest you:
* https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/413
* https://github.com/Shinmera/talks/blob/master/gic2021-highly-dynamic/paper.pdf
and the very recent still front-page discussion on hn:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32043026
> more concerned than necessary.
I would say so, specially when you plan to use it for web dev (welcome!). Shinmera has released a game in CL heavily depending on CLOS (object system), and he says the GC is barely a matter.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Shinmera/talks/master/els2023-kandria/paper.pdf
https://kandria.com/ (https://github.com/Shirakumo/kandria)
https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/413
I use Emacs, Slime, SBCL, yes. Since it uses SBCL, game code is compiled to native machine code for each supported platform and architecture.
You can find more info on the dev process here: https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/413
And the source code for the engine, Trial, and the game, Kandria, are both on our GitHub under Shirakumo.