Empirically this is not true and the article overstates its claim by using "often", unless we take it to mean the tens of included macros that come with the language and aren't ad-hoc, undocumented, or barely working. (Or reinvented, coming with the language.) (Like the ones for defining functions, or classes, or structs, or looping, or multi-branch conditionals...) Take a random sampling of Lisp projects and libraries and you'll see the vast majority are using plain standard Common Lisp and lack a bespoke DSL. Some are more object-oriented, some are more imperative, some are more functional, they look pretty normal within each paradigm. The ability to easily create DSLs is indeed a nifty feature that can lead to the benefits described (https://www.stylewarning.com/posts/nbody/ is a post I've been fond of linking this year), along with the downsides, but that hardly represents most Lisp code. The feature wouldn't make a top-5 for reasons Lisp "never catches on", whatever that means. (Like the sibling I'm wondering if C is included in that assessment, or from another direction, Clojure.)