Here you will find some screenshots of some of today's web applications built in CL: http://lisp-screenshots.org/ and here an opinionated tutorial: https://web-apps-in-lisp.github.io/ One example: ScreenShotBot https://screenshotbot.io/ a successful open-source product and company. It now replaced Facebook's automatic screenshot testing tool (source: their blog). So, web apps in Lisp are possible -with a right amount of learning time and elbow grease.

The incremental development and interactive top-level are still precious and unmatched.

    (defparameter *a* (list 1 2 3))

- why nothing on the "compiler" line? Everytime you load a snippet or a file with SBCL, it compiles it (to machine code). There's also compile-file.

- interpreter: likewise, all code is compiled by default with SBCL, not interpreted, even in the REPL. To use the interpreter, we must do this: https://github.com/lisp-tips/lisp-tips/issues/52

- command line program: the racket cell shows the use of -e (eval), the same can be done with any CL implementation.

- since the string split line introduces cl-ppcre, one could mention cl-str :D (plug) (much terser join, trim, concat etc)

- ah ok, for dates and times, flattening a list, hash-table literals… we need more libraries.

- more files operations: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/files.html

- emacs buffers: now compare with Lem buffers 8-)

- posix-getenv: I'd rather use uiop:getenv (comes in implementations).

- uiop:*command-line-arguments*

- exit: uiop:quit

- uiop:run-program (sync) / launch-program (async)

- java interop: with LispWorks or ABCL (or other libraries)

my 2c

discussion (2023): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38052564

SBCL (16 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140657 (107 comments)

Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41530783 (81 comments)

An exploration of SBCL internals https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40115083 (106 comments)

Arena Allocation in SBCL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38052564 (32 comments)

SBCL (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36544573 (167 comments)

Parallel garbage collection for SBCL [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37296153 (45 comments)

SBCL 2.3.5 released https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107154 (31 comments)

Using SBCL Common Lisp as a Dynamic Library (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31054796 (67 comments)

etc

Some companies: https://github.com/azzamsa/awesome-lisp-companies/ (Routific, Google's ITA Software, SISCOG running resource planning in transportation, trading, big data analysis, cloud-to-cloud services, open-source tools (pgloader, re-written from Python), games (Kandria, on Steam and GOG, runs on the Switch), music composition software and apps…

More success stories: https://www.lispworks.com/success-stories/

I myself run web-apps and scripts for clients. Didn't ditch Django yet but working on that.

Links to Coalton and related libraries and apps (included Lem editor's mode and a web playground): https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/#typing

- tree shaking and small binaries (±5MB a GUI app)

- the CAPI cross-platform and native GUI toolkit

- mobile platforme runtime (iOs, Android)

- its Java interface

- its KnowledgeWorks system for "rule-based, object-oriented, logical, functional and database programming"

- more?

ps: today we maintain a list of pretty decent libraries: https://github.com/CodyReichert/awesome-cl/