Another problem that LISP had was the era of it's widest use -- an era when compilers and most programming tools were proprietary, very expensive, entirely clos

Another problem that LISP had was the era of it's widest use -- an era when compilers and most programming tools were proprietary, very expensive, entirely closed and usually dependent on one or another variant hardware platform. This was also the pre-cambrian era of computer architecture where the hardware varied so much that porting was a serious issue. Nowadays, languages which have popped into existance and gained wide acceptance (perl, ruby, python, for example) were developed in an open-source world. And now, finally, lisp is catching up in that regard.