> The reason Lisp failed was that it was too successful at what it was designed for. Lisp, alone amongst the early languages was flexible enough that the language itself could be remade into whatever the user required. [...] However, the process causes Balkanization. It results in many sub-languages all slightly different. This is the true reason why Lisp code is unreadable to others. In most other languages it is relatively simple to work out what a given line of code does. Lisp, with its extreme expressibility, causes problems as a given symbol could be a variable, function or operator, and a large amount of code may need to be read to find out which.
And I perfectly agree. You can see it in tutorials too. You can even see it in any Lisp-lover comments showing you a proud snippet of how "it can be solved better with lisp": it's too clever.
A little bit of clever is fun, it's good for the soul, it can even be productive. But Lisp is just a big pile of cleverness.
Being clever is so appealing to my geek nature. It's so cool. Yet experience (in coding and life) taught me it is not a good property to build a community around. Or a project for that matter.
At best, it's something that can emerge from a battle against long and arduous stream of problems. And then you can rest, you try to factor away the cleverness. But not as a goal. Not as a basic proposition.