Comment by BrandonM

Many comments mention the merits of Lisp. That's all well and good, but I think they miss the largely historical reasons that Lisp is so popular here:

Paul Graham wrote Ansi Common Lisp and On Lisp. Both are great books and were used in university courses in the 90s and 00s.

Paul Graham cofounded a startup called Viaweb, implemented in Lisp, that sold to Yahoo.

Paul Graham wrote a bunch of essays about tech startups at paulgraham.com. These essays frequently extolled the virtues of Lisp and other high level languages, citing it as a major factor in Viaweb's success.

Paul Graham, in his essays, strongly encouraged skilled, motivated programmers to build startups instead of working at large companies.

Paul Graham created Y Combinator, betting his time and money on the growth of startups that he predicted and promoted, popularizing startup incubators in the process.

Paul Graham created Startup News when Reddit started going mainstream, predating the existence of subreddits. Startup News provided a real-world application to inform the design and development of Arc, a Lisp language.

Paul Graham renamed Startup News to Hacker News. And here we are.

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As someone who has been here for 12½ years, I view the Lisp sentiment as echoes of HN's past, inextricably linked to the Lisp enthusiasm of HN's founder: Paul Graham.

While I agree with many comments here that Lisp is a language worth learning, I think they miss the mark as to why Lisp continues to come up on Hacker News. The majority of the original Startup News members were Lisp enthusiasts.