So if lisp is so great and so are reader macros, why didn't Macsyma/Maxima win over Mathematica? There's one very specific reason: somehow, someway, a deal was

So if lisp is so great and so are reader macros, why didn't Macsyma/Maxima win over Mathematica? There's one very specific reason: somehow, someway, a deal was set up where Symbolics managed to get the sole commercial licence to it, as far as we can tell to require users to buy one or more of their machines to use it, if they weren't using MIT-MC, a fast ECL KL10, but still just one machine. Stephen Wolfram had already gotten screwed at least as badly as Joel Moses did by CalTech WRT to his Symbolic Manipulation Program (SMP), but I suppose among other things, not having tenure, nor more than a 5 year association with CalTech (by comparison, Joel eventually became Provost), nor as much invested in SMP, he left, and after 3 years at the IAS, presumably was damned sure to dot all his i's and cross all his t's when he started the next version. tl;dr: Macsyma was put in the hospital as a toddler and never really recovered, SMP was strangled in its cradle, and with the hindsight of history, Mathematica avoided these fates.