We are doing computational chemistry, simulating molecular structure and designing molecules, and we want to use thousands of cores and get as much performance as possible. If my AWS bills are any measure - then yes - the cost savings in electricity and computing resources are very significant.
Also, developing and maintaining Python/C++ bindings for complex libraries is very painful and frustrating. I wrote Python bindings for years using boost::python and earlier Swig and keeping bindings working and dealing with the different memory management approaches of Python and C++... bleh - it's a nightmare. At the same time Python changed from version 2 to 3.x and libraries I depended on and my own Python code was being broken and becoming outdated in ways that I had no control over. It was like trying to build a house out of sand.
I've only been using Common Lisp for the past 6 years - after three decades of writing in other languages including Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk, C, Fortran, Python, PHP, Forth, Prolog... Common Lisp feels great, it feels powerful and every function I write I know will compile and run in 20 years. Common Lisp has real macros (programs that write programs! implemented in one language), dynamic variables, generic functions, the Common Lisp Object System, conditions and restarts... There are many features that haven't made it into other languages. Common Lisp makes programming interesting again.
Also, developing and maintaining Python/C++ bindings for complex libraries is very painful and frustrating. I wrote Python bindings for years using boost::python and earlier Swig and keeping bindings working and dealing with the different memory management approaches of Python and C++... bleh - it's a nightmare. At the same time Python changed from version 2 to 3.x and libraries I depended on and my own Python code was being broken and becoming outdated in ways that I had no control over. It was like trying to build a house out of sand.
I've only been using Common Lisp for the past 6 years - after three decades of writing in other languages including Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk, C, Fortran, Python, PHP, Forth, Prolog... Common Lisp feels great, it feels powerful and every function I write I know will compile and run in 20 years. Common Lisp has real macros (programs that write programs! implemented in one language), dynamic variables, generic functions, the Common Lisp Object System, conditions and restarts... There are many features that haven't made it into other languages. Common Lisp makes programming interesting again.