Languages need a window of opportunity, and many of those squandered it.
Clojure won over Scala because at the time when people were loooking for an alternative JVM langauge, Clojure was more of a departure from Java and seemed to have better tooling (compile times and syntax support) than Scala.
Smalltalk and Common Lisp wasted their moment by not being cheap/free to people using micros in the 1980s.
Lisp, especially, very much wasted its moment with micros. The fact that no Lisper had the vision to dump a Lisp onto the bank switched micros (which makes GC really easy and useful) of the mid to late 1980s is a self-inflicted bullet wound. Lots of us hated doing assembly language programming but had no real alternative. This was a loss born of pure arrogance of Lispers who looked down on those micros as not being "real machines".
I weep for all the hours I wasted doing assembly language as a teenager that I could have been writing Lisp. How much software could have been written that would have been <100 lines of Lisp if only someone had written that tool?