Comment by cultofmetatron

> makes me wonder if there's something the "wisdom of the crowds" knows that I'm not aware of.

As I alluded to earlier, its really hard to scale a dev team when the language does nothing to keep you on the rails. As an engineer, I hate go for its lack of abstractions and verbosity. As a CTO, I can appreciate that its trying to reduce the friction in making sure all code looks familiar and that any engineer can be rotated into it. TLDR: the things that make common lisp so good for a lone dev are what make it hard for larger projects and most projects nowadays have multiple contributors. I wouldn't start a startup on common lisp today unless you were trying to do something truly novel and your team was all seasoned and experienced devs. throwing a bunch of vibe coding juniors on common lisp is a recipe for disaster while you might make it to a series A using a language like go.

Personally, I love elixir as I think it strikes a really good balance. My team is all older programmers. Our youngest guy is 32 and we have all developed a pretty good intuition for maintaining a descent code base.

> Does it only work on source codes or can I distribute a binary and let my users debug the code like this? Should I distribute the 'image' for it to work?

I wouldn't hand it to the end user but paul grahm famously did cowboy debugging on live servers. A user would cal complaining of a error and paul could go in and patch it in real time while observing the runtime of the system the user was on.

I think it goes without saying that that was a different time and we def can't do that kind of thing today.

> And is the fix temporary (until the program dies) or permanant?

you patch teh code and reload it into your running vm. so its permanent.