There's also the factor that the over promising of what expert systems and AI in general could do that lead to the AI Winter were conveniently blamed on Lisp, s

There's also the factor that the over promising of what expert systems and AI in general could do that lead to the AI Winter were conveniently blamed on Lisp, seeing as how it couldn't have been simple failures to execute, or execute the impossible. Or so goes one version of the Official Story, I wasn't really a witness to more than the beginning of that, when they were grossly over-hyped. Or solved the wrong problem, my favorite example there being DEC's configuration -> part numbers to order expert system. Sun made it simple, at the lowest level of a workstation, the major choices of the sort DEC was optimizing came down to which keyboard and power cord you ordered to fix your country's standards.