The best you'll get are examples of something solvable in Python being "beautiful" in Lisp. Then some real world Lisp examples will be references to a 20 year old storefront generator and the initial release of reddit.
Lisp(s) are certainly better than Python in every way, except when it comes to successful projects completed.
I think you need a bigger reference frame of Lisp's usage over its 50 year history that extends even to 2015. But even then, quoting Kent Pitman: "Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list." (My additions are video games and Mars rovers.)
Part of the visibility issue is that there are very few big-name open source Common Lisp success stories which aren't CL implementations, or CL ecosystem tools. Most of the things in that list are big-ticket enterprisey applications.
Lisp's Eclipse is called GNU Emacs and it's free software. It comes with more than a million lines of Lisp code supporting all kinds of development tasks.
It's also not Common Lisp. I get that emacs lisp is a pretty good example of a lisp, but I do find it interesting that the Lisp designed to be the widely-applicable industry standard hasn't seen something on the same level.
> So what's stopped these from getting to Emacs' level of popularity?
Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a family of editors. You are probably talking about GNU Emacs.
They never tried and it would not make sense. GNU Emacs exists already and supports Lisp development very well. The other tools have concentrated on other things: GUI-based IDEs for Lisp.
> Emacs is not an editor. Emacs is a family of editors. You are probably talking about GNU Emacs.
You tell me, you brought it up!
> They never tried and it would not make sense. GNU Emacs exists already and supports Lisp development very well. The other tools have concentrated on other things: GUI-based IDEs for Lisp.
Emacs is for more than Lisp development, though. It's not popular because you can do Lisp in it, it's popular because you can do everything in it. So we're back to my earlier question, which is why we haven't seen major, broad-based wins for Common Lisp, on the scale that we have for other languages.
> Emacs is for more than Lisp development, though.
Not Emacs, GNU Emacs. That's what I wrote.
> we haven't seen major, broad-based wins for Common Lisp, on the scale that we have for other languages.
Common Lisp tends to be used in very specialized areas. It's a complex language.
Though sometimes it has been used where you don't see it, but you may be affected. American Express runs a Lisp based system checking credit card transactions. Should be running for two decades or longer. Amazon was using Lisp to compute some stuff on their shopping pages. CIA and NSA use it to spy on us. Lots of aircrafts (Airbus & Boeing) and cars (Jaguar, Ford, ...) were designed with Lisp-based CAD systems. NASA uses it for checking software correctness. Chip makers like AMD have used it to check processor designs for correct operations. There are many of those applications. Google's flight search engine has its core written in Lisp. Dwave wrote the software for their quantum processor in Lisp. There is a broadband internet of satellite company running Lisp on their antennas. Parts of the precursor software of Apple's Siri were written in Lisp. That's the stuff what it was originally was designed for...
Lisp(s) are certainly better than Python in every way, except when it comes to successful projects completed.