[CyberFonic]

Your questions are well answered by Paul Graham in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html.

There are many Common Lisp and Scheme environments. Many have excellent JIT compilers. They all have their relative strengths and weaknesses. So it really depends on your specific use case as to which environment has the best support. For me the biggest factor is that Lisp is very productive for use by a small and competent team. In those situations they tend to create a DSL and evolve the system. PG's essay describes the reason Lisp fails many projects in the section "The Blub Paradox".

[d0m]

I'm a big PG fan but to be honest, him building viaweb in Lisp is 99% because: "Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp.", and not because of a competitive advantage in the language.

There are so many things that can go wrong in a startup, it's not the time to pick a stack or database you know nothing about.

[dhab]

Unfortunately, PG's post is orthogonal to what I am trying to find. My concerns are mostly around community and operational aspects AFTER adopting lisp