Programming in Lisp is like programming in assembler. Reading it is worse. The learning curve is tremendous.
Languages serve lots of demographics, not just comp-sci wonks.
Now, they are "wonks" for knowing a slightly different (and demonstrably effective) style of programming.
In bioinformatics knowing about, say, functional programming and parallel algorithms could be really useful where data coming out of sequencers is growing faster than Moore's law can keep up, if you want to scale across many cores as efficiently as possible.
Or graph theory, or... any number of useful techniques waiting for an application.
The rest of the crowd is trying to ship code, in the toolset they have some facility with. That toolset has to be available, easily digestible, hopefully targeted at their problem space.
I've had a number of fun conversations discussing and demonstrating Scheme with novice and 'rank-and-file Java/C#' types. The ones who find programming languages fun in themselves are the sort of people who light right up when they're introduced to something like Scheme. That's really all it takes is just a bit of passion and curiosity to make the leap.
In my experience, professional folks I've spoken to have either never heard of Lisp or have associated it with antiquity. You'd be very surprised who'd appreciate being shown new ways of doing things.
When you say things like this, part of me hears you saying, "I have not invested time learning this skillset. However, people argue I should. So I have decided said people are 'wonks,' and therefore I can safely dismiss them." Basically anyone with any differentiation from your skillset falls into that definition.
Now that there are millions of programmers. Programming shifted from a fine art to a pop art, to crib something from Alan Kay.
there's nothing magical about lisp compared to other languages. to read it you don't need a cs degree and you don't need vast levels of intelligence - you just need practice. after a while it becomes quite clear.
you're free to think whatever you want, of course, but this kind of negative attitude - "it's for the smart people, not me" - just means that you lose out.
lisp itself is not that far from a language like python (or, i guess, in the context of this thread, ruby) once you get used to it. it's really not rocket science. all you're doing here is harming yourself.
So, thus, the (Very) slow acceptance of Lisp.
>> The learning curve is tremendous.
edit: not that I consider it to be like assembly, really.