This old argument. I won't say a thing about Lisp. Let's talk about Ruby. For those of you who were using Ruby in 2005 when Rails was released. Are there any of these arguments that you haven't heard at least once in the last eight years about Ruby? That it's too powerful, that programmers make their own idiosyncratic worlds, that programs are too complicated to understand, &c. &c.

Yet, somehow, There is tons of working Ruby code in production and people have found a way to harness its power. People are awfully clever, I very much doubt that any serious language (i.e. a language not designed to confuse) can't be whipped into shape by a team of reasonable people who are motivated to succeed.

The "failure" of Lisp has a very simple explanation, so simple that people gloss over it. Every successful language began as the scripting language of some system that was itself exploding in popularity.

To be a hit, a language must arrive in the mass market's consciousness in tandem with its "platform." Objective C failed until the iPhone was a hit. C was a hit with Unix and then Windows. Ruby was a hit when Rails was a hit.

Lisp was the scripting language of Lisp machines. When the "AI Winter" hit Lisp machines, it hit Lisp. It never became the scripting language of something else that was exploding in popularity.

Today JavaScript is the scripting language of browsers, so it is a hit, and it doesn't matter whether its first-class functions are elegant (they are), whether its semantics have stupid corner cases (they do), or whether its inheritance model is obscure (prototypes!?).

Just show me something exploding in popularity, and I'll show you a successful programming language.

UPDATE:

I see folks are arguing about what colour to paint the phrase "Scripting Language." Must a scripting language be interpreted? Is Java interpreted? What about JIT techniques for JavaScript? When we transpile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, what is going on? I have a CPU that executes microcode. Is ASM for this CPU really an interpreted language?

All good stuff. By the way, Lisp was originally interpreted, compilers didn't come along until later. So... Was it a scripting language until it was "compiled?"

Have fun, but please remember to leave room in the shed for me to park my tandem.