So... If I give you some binaries.. would you even care?

Really? What does the language it's written in have to do with anything at all here?

Here it actually matters a bit. The pgloader project was rewritten in Common Lisp from the original Python version to speed up processing the data. You want to be able to migrate terabyte databases without too much downtime.

Just because a few very disciplined people can make something clean and functional in a language does not mean it's a strength of the language. PHP is great as a template language, but when it comes to manipulating data it's somewhat louche approach to data types is a liability.