>I sometimes wonder why Lisp has not been more popular in the technology industry. Is it the lack of sufficient marketing? In the late 70s, cheap computers (IM

>I sometimes wonder why Lisp has not been more popular in the technology industry. Is it the lack of sufficient marketing? In the late 70s, cheap computers (IMSAI, Altair) were almost unable to run Lisp for useful purposes. Too little memory. Minicomputers (DEC PDP /etc) were able to run full Lisp implementations but it worked slower than using other languages. Lisp Machines (MIT CONS, etc) were able to run Lisp fast but those were dedicated, specialized hardware. And expensive. Enter the late 80s; Lisp ran great on personal computers but implementations AFAIK were mostly commercial, so reserved to big budgets. I'd say Common Lisp did have success on the industry, used for many things (3D, CAD/CAM, simulation, etc). Meanwhile the rest of the world was on Pascal, C, and C++. Nowadays things are different, there are many Common Lisp implementations that are free and are good (SBCL and CCL, for example, are lightning fast). But additionally, it is difficult to understand what advantages would Lisp bring. For this, the developer would have to grok (completely understand) the enormous value of metaprogramming, and to understand as well how flexible is CLOS.