There are many views on this (so please don’t take my word as gospel), but from my experience, Lisp gives the following benefits:

- A fantastic and easy to use open source web server in Hunchentoot

- Very easy integration into databases like PostgreSQL. Just looking at my guide shows how easy all this is (assuming you know lisp, but if you look at the number of lines of code - it’s not that much)

- Live debugging - I.e. I can recompile certain functions and don’t need to restart my web server! That’s a huge win in my opinion

- It’s hard to explain, but I find Lisp very transparent. With knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS and Lisp, I am very comfortable building any web app. Whereas when I use various web frameworks like react, angular, etc, I have to spend so much learning it’s idiosyncrasies (which to me is a waste of time since these frameworks keep changing), and then usually I hit a brick wall somewhere. Other frameworks in my opinion obfuscate too much - they solve for easy wins (which they do), but anything more complex and you are fighting against the language, spending hours on Stack Overflow for solutions to what should be simple problems. In my opinion

I spent 1-2 weeks setting up a CRUD app with Angular and still don’t know the best way to use it. With Lisp, I did the same in one day. It was that experience that pushed to me to learning and using Lisp (I was a complete beginner at the time). For me that was enough proof

- Stuff like NPM I don’t like because there are so many dependencies (which break from time to time) and I’m worried somebody could be putting in bugs / trackers in these packages. I don’t like having many dependencies

- Ability to write DSLs (Domain Specific Language) where I can easily write macros to generate JavaScript and HTML for me from Lisp, increasing the cohesiveness of the whole program

All that said, Lisp by itself is not enough. HTML/CSS/JavaScript are much more important - Lisp is the magic server side plug for all of this, and in my opinion, better than server side JavaScript because Lisp is a very well thought and well featured language (JavaScript is as well, but I think Lisp, at least to me, is slightly more enjoyable to write in).

I find the issue with Lisp is that it’s not used much, so outside of some very good packages, there are many parts which are easier to do in other languages / frameworks with much bigger ecosystems. For me, web development is the exception, because all you need is HTML/CSS/JS and a good server side language.

Other languages are also very good, so this is just a personal opinion. If you like to invest your time in one core language, and not have to keep learning new web frameworks, I recommend Lisp.

It’s very good for solo programmers or small teams, but I do think it’s not suitable in larger teams as I do find lisp code can be a bit harder to read and also most people don’t use lisp.

So in my uneducated view - if you have spare time, if you like working from first principles and have a scientific / mathematical mindset, and if you are working alone or in small teams, I highly recommend Lisp for web dev.

If you are more business minded and want to scale your project quickly and hire more developers, then using an off the shelf package makes more sense.

If you are time poor, stick to what you know - the differences aren’t THAT great, and it’s better to build something now than to spend most of your time learning a new language (unless you have time to devote to it - in which I highly recommend learning Lisp :) It really makes me smile every time I code in Lisp :)