Even if your assumption about the trend being to higher levels of abstraction (which is highly questionable) is correct, this doesn't give any credence to the p

Even if your assumption about the trend being to higher levels of abstraction (which is highly questionable) is correct, this doesn't give any credence to the prediction that it will make Lisp finally popular. Yes, Lisp is a 4GL but even if everyone is rushing toward 4GL, there are plenty to choose from and it's not clear that they will flock toward Lisp. Even if CS is still pretty recent (50+ years), there is still something to be said about a language that never managed to become mainstream in that period. Whether Lisp was ahead of its time is irrelevant. The question is: will there ever be a time where Lisp will be ripe for its time? I think that window closed a while ago. It's not about the parentheses or its FP side, it's just that the world is moving toward statically typed languages with sophisticated type inference, and it's a league that Lisp simply doesn't belong to.