Languages like Lisp, APL, and Haskell reward extraordinary skill with extraordinary power. If you're a researcher or an early-stage startup founder, that's great. You want your little band of geniuses to have the maximum possible leverage.

But if you're an engineering leader at a large company, the last thing you want is an asset in your portfolio that only extraordinarily skilled people can work on. What if they quit? What if your company's stature declines and you can't attract such people anymore? What if a more pressing problem comes along and you want to deploy them elsewhere?

So we get languages with short learning curves and low ceilings (Go!) instead.

Except in performance critical contexts, where it can’t be helped, but C++ already won that one.