[veddox]

I still wish I could work in Lisp, but have also become very happy with Julia.

Julia is not as elegant as Lisp and doesn't offer as many powerful language constructs. But it is a very cleanly designed and well thought-out language that is fun to work in. I especially love its metaprogramming abilities (heavily drawn from Lisp), which include "real" macros.

In the end, the reason I use Julia over Lisp is the community and the ecosystem. As an ecological modeller, Julia is something my colleagues have at least heard of and that I can convince a few to use (instead of R and Netlogo). I fear that I could never convince anybody to use or contribute to a software written CL. Also, the Julia standard library is just very well put together and there are more packages available for the things that I need to do, compared to CL.

I still love CL as a language and sometimes toy with the idea of going back to it, but for the moment, practicality beats purity.