Ahh, Lisp… an embodiment why true computer scientists never actually manage to explain themselves to anyone or get anything useful done in time.
Cas 
Whaaa runs in circles 
Back in the days reddit was written in lisp
Clojure is a language written with the aspect of productivity in mind (it’s kind of the philosophy that the creator had during coding it).
Just my 2 cents!
I second that emotion. JS can go bite me.
Yeah, well, there may not be a best. But there only really exist one so, I don’t think hierarchy matters tiddly squat.
I get lots done on time. That why I have yet to get fired and have a reason to work on games for a living
Lisp is in fact pretty cool out of the academic languages. But yea there is a big divide that typically has more to do with tool chains and just tools than the languages.
Let me try to help teach the heathens the secret of fire:
Take 1) In good meta languages you’re not stuck with merely “code is data”…you get “code as data”. Simple! Any sparks yet from the flint? No??
Take 2) The usable ones are minimal because you’re creating the language you need to perform your task!!! Humm…strike the metal at slant against the rock. Here…like this!!! See???
Take 3) You get to be the front-end compiler?? Clear??? Do you THINGS speak!!!
Take 4) When all else fails: XKCD to the rescue:
And for new comers:
And a last one for good measure:
There’s the fundamental problem with meta-languages and, indeed, DSLs… when everyone starts just inventing their own dialects to solve problems, yes, wonderful, we get very concise and sometimes less leaky abstractions for our problems. However the rest of the world looks on in bemusement wondering what it all means. There’s a happy medium somewhere in between which turns out to be popular because it seems to fit more peoples’ minds more easily, and that’s why we’re stuck with nice simple OOP/procedural/imperative languages largely with smatterings of functional.
Cas
True, very true. However i feel the academic divide is more fundamental and that for a lot of languages (not just DSL), it is the academic divide that matters.
The best way to see the academic divide is look at what most of the people using the language do with it. If its write that languages compiler, you have found the problem.
And by divide i mean people who care more about some abstract something or other, that than just getting code out that works. There may be ugly bits. But it works!
To summarise. Yea javascript or something that uses javascript under the hood won’t be the wrong choice.
I full endorse ugly bits. And I spend about 90% of my time in ‘lesser’ languages because I can find one that’s a good sweet-point of productivity vs. expressability. (And it would be more like 99% of the time if Mathematica wasn’t the most awesome piece of software ever written). If the JVM would just added those few important missing pieces…I’d be happy heathen.