Kind of yes and kind of no. Not many reasons to use Common Lisp I agree, but the Lisp idea itself has still something to offer that couldn’t be found in other systems.

I’m comfortable to declare that are not macros the most powerful thing of Lisp, but the concept of an environment. Still in 2026 many languages now implement the concept of evaluating the code and make it immediately available but nothing is like Lisp.

Lower level programming languages today they all still requires compilation. Lisp is one of the few that I found having the possibility to eval code and its immediately usable and probably the only that really relies heavily on REPL driven development.

Env+REPL imo is the true power still far ahead of other languages. I can explore the memory of my program while my program is running, change the code and see the changes in real time.

The issue is that CL is old, and Clojure is so close to be perfect if it wasn’t for Java. Clojure replaces Java, not CL and this is its strength but also its weakness.