The deal breaker for me is the unwillingness to rename outdated identifiers: `car` instead of `first` or `head` and `cdr` instead of `rest` or `tail`; the use of asterisks to show that a function differs in semantics (`let` versus `let*`); and the verbosity of using anything other than a pure list.
If I had to use a Lisp-like language, I'd choose Clojure so I can interoperate with the JVM. (I use Scala already, so I could interoperate with that, too.)
I designed my own Lisp dialect that is very influenced by Common Lisp. It has the cadar functions down to five levels deep. They are awesome. I have about 17 years of Lisp coding experience. Only in the last few years, I have come around to using those cddrcadr and so on. They express the right thing when the subject is tree structure, rather than a flat list which contains items.
Suppose that we have used (cddr x) to test whether the list
x continues after the second item. It is then unnatural to have (third x) to retrieve the third item! It is like "faulty parallelism" in your English essay. :)
If the condition (and (cdr x) (consp (cddr x))) holds, then the proper way to get that item is (caddr x). This is easy to verify: If cddr is a cons, then its car is given by tacking on an "a": caddr.
In any case, car, cdr and the rest are an absolute must in a Lisp dialect. They are instantly understandable; there is no good reason to break with this important convention. A Lisp dialect will not achieve anything by breaking cultural compatibility with other dialects in this regard; it will just be shunned by Lisp people yet still disused by everyone else. Although CAR and CDR come from IBM 704 machine language, which means nothing to pretty much anyone over fifty years later, the people who allowed these names to infect the higher level language weren't idiots. They discovered that the names just work and so used them. Borrowing some mnemonic that works from the IBM 704 is no worse than borrowing some equally arbitrary greek letter like lambda from a branch of mathematics. If the mathematics of anonymous functions had been called "Tau Calculus" we would be writing (tau (x y) + x y) instead of lambda; it's just a historic accident. All names are historic accidents: one person calls it water, another one aqua, a third one mizu.
I also love the star convention and have used it in many places. for instance mapcar* is a lazy mapcar: it can take infinite lists as its arguments and returns the resulting lazy list immediately. Leslie Lamport picked up on this star notation in LaTeX; that's where I first encountered it. When I got into Lisp years later it was like, hello, is that where Lamport got it from?
I don't like verbosity, so I made my dialect slick and ergonomic. It can "code-golf" side by side with the so-called "modern" scripting languages, while remaining clear.
I would love to learn Rust, but the learning curve seems a bit too steep for me. The whole struggle with lifetimes is what has kept me from diving in. It seems impossible to me to figure out how to use them correctly. Plus the redundant syntax, I guess. If those things weren't an issue for me, I would gladly try to learn Rust.
Net neutrality has been a buzzword for a while now. Large new companies like to harp on it just for views, and they don't really explain to viewers just what losing it will mean. FOX News's motto "We report. You Decide" makes it evident that large networks don't care about the validity of information, just that it generates the largest amount of revenue for them. Companies (and individuals) with money won't care about net neutrality--they can pay their way around it. But the casual user can't afford that, and they aren't being educated as to what this means for them. We need to get large news networks to accurately report the situation and how consumers can help.
I imagine it would be possible (though difficult) to autoplay videos which are related to each other and gradually converge to something that would interest the viewer.
For example, Russian dash cams to Russia at night to the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta, to horror games to video games in general, if that is what the user tends to watch.
I know this has graph theory written all over it and the shortest-distance problem has wreaked havoc for centuries, but I think with enough resources Google/YouTube could find a good compromise in this situation.
If I had to use a Lisp-like language, I'd choose Clojure so I can interoperate with the JVM. (I use Scala already, so I could interoperate with that, too.)