Many years back, at a movie studio, I was working on an application that would enable users to mine historical release data for planning. I started off with a proof of concept in RoR (v0.2ish) days and on a flight home read 'Hackers and Painters'.
After the trip came back and dropped RoR and prototyped the app in CL (CMUCL IIRC). The users loved it, so to deploy it with a UI, ended up with Lisplets [1] (checkout who wrote it!)
Fast forward a year or so, the users were happily mining the data with a clear impact on bottom line. Then I came across NLP in CL and extended the app with NLP functionality so users could do kind of google search for their queries ("show me all movies which were directed by X and starred Y, Z and made N dollars in A, B, C territories). Writing NLP app in non ML hype phase was fun, note that there was some simple query syntax for users to learn.
Last I heard, after I left, a year or so later, they did a rewrite of the app in Java land; most Lispers here can predict how that story ended :-(. One of the most enjoyable phases in my career and don't even ask me how I pulled off writing CL in corporate for 4+ years, because frankly I don't remember (side effect of coding in CL being fun!) but I think my manager had failingly invested a lot in getting this app developed prior to giving me a chance to prototype 'quickly' and I think the prior pressure of not-shipping helped me.
I've worked on a couple large Web-involved projects that would not have been viable, had they not used a Lisp (one Scheme, one CL). (The Scheme one, some advanced ancient astronaut before me had single-handedly made an architecture that did every complicated thing needed, and I'd say wouldn't have been viable to do in a non-Lisp.)
It's easier in the last few years to see why startups aren't using a Lisp, despite PG's early advocacy of that -- they want a very polished-looking Web/app frontend, and everyone is pushing you to buy into their frameworks and SDKs for that.
But I'd still like to see some students who played with Racket/Scheme/CL in college spin out to do a startup with a Lisp for prototyping/beta, and once they have real funding (when they should probably be rewriting prototype code in any case, or even pivoting) decide whether to keep going with a Lisp. (If they keep going with a Lisp, a bonus is that they have special access to a disproportionately high-skilled labor pool, like in other niches that attract nerdy enthusiasts.)
After the trip came back and dropped RoR and prototyped the app in CL (CMUCL IIRC). The users loved it, so to deploy it with a UI, ended up with Lisplets [1] (checkout who wrote it!)
Fast forward a year or so, the users were happily mining the data with a clear impact on bottom line. Then I came across NLP in CL and extended the app with NLP functionality so users could do kind of google search for their queries ("show me all movies which were directed by X and starred Y, Z and made N dollars in A, B, C territories). Writing NLP app in non ML hype phase was fun, note that there was some simple query syntax for users to learn.
Last I heard, after I left, a year or so later, they did a rewrite of the app in Java land; most Lispers here can predict how that story ended :-(. One of the most enjoyable phases in my career and don't even ask me how I pulled off writing CL in corporate for 4+ years, because frankly I don't remember (side effect of coding in CL being fun!) but I think my manager had failingly invested a lot in getting this app developed prior to giving me a chance to prototype 'quickly' and I think the prior pressure of not-shipping helped me.
[1] http://lisplets.sourceforge.net
[2] https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J90-2005