The thread title is weird. "Alternative" programming languages, compared to what? You even suggested the relatively young (and not very interesting) Python to be a "traditional" language - compared to what? It is hard to name languages if their superset is undefined.

Common Lisp is a very good language indeed, but it lacks a standard package manager. Quicklisp might be the most commonly used one, but when I released my RSS generator and shared it with Hacker News, some of the commenters told me that they actually don't use that. So, in order to distribute my Common Lisp applications in a non-binary form, I would need to invest more work than I'd like to - or make life for my potential users harder than I should. That's why I stopped sharing my Common Lisp code. My former excitement for Pascal has faded for similar reasons: The small standard library would require a metric ton of dependencies to be shipped. Even Delphi faces a similar problem.

As you keep mentioning Zig, my point of view on "modern C"-lookalikes is that Go has won this war and there is no reason for a third language between Go (client/server applications) and C (local applications) to exist. Go has an excellent toolset and is rather portable (even on Plan 9). The relevant advantage of C over Go is that the Go enforces a very verbose code style, including only one allowed way to place braces. I like writing in Go though.

The only other language which I refuse to give up is Perl which works great for web applications and has a giant community because of its age. All other languages depend on their use case; I even try COBOL every now and then. - But sometimes the languages choose me: I recently found a problem when trying to use Go to replace an aging Python tool of mine. Now the only other good API client for what I intend to achieve is a Rust one... hmm.

Unrelated side note: I wish I could understand APL better. APL looks efficient.