What became of Ihaka & Temple Lang's (2008) "Back to the Future"?

I see the ESS Manual states

NIMBLE has re-vitalized the BUGS language,

referring to DTL’s NIMBLE project. Also, a JAGS 5.0 release appears to be in the works!

As for Lisp, I’m now feeling burdened by a lot of technical debt from past investments in R (incl. Shiny), and wish I had known enough back then to consider alternatives. The complete path enumeration I implemented (with R6 classes, ugh!) could have been done so much more elegantly (and faster) in Common Lisp. And I bet I could have avoided implementing the CRM in Rust, too.

Julia might also have been a good solution to my two language problem.

But one of the things that delights me about Lisp is this incomparable tactile experience:

Emacs Rocks! Episode 14: Paredit

which reminds me in some ways of Bruce Lee’s admonition that “code must flow like water.”