Right, because nothing in the technological landscape changes, ever, in any way that could be relevant to the success of a Lisp-like language.

I'm not saying I'm convinced a Lisp-like will explode, much less that it'll be Clojure in particular, and I do think it important to keep the history in mind, but I think you overstated things.

Lisp suffered from the AI Winter and the lack of acceptance of GC based languages on mainstream computers due to their limited capabilities.

Many of the capabilities of modern IDEs were already available in Lisp and Smaltalk environments in the early 80's, but you could buy a house with the price of those systems.

I wonder if any Rubyists said something similar pre-Rails.