I have some experience with writing in Lisp without good libraries for what I'm doing. It turns out not to be an enormous amount of work to turn an unmaintained unusable FFI to the C library you want into a highly usable, Lispish library. It can at times even be useful for understanding said library. I'm not saying this isn't a drawback of Lisp, but it's also not as huge a barrier as some might think. FFI's have gotten good enough that it doesn't really matter that much what language the library is written in.
