(I am referring to Lisp here as mostly the Common Lisp and the Scheme variety) There is also the issue where are a lot of areas like UX and tooling requires b

(I am referring to Lisp here as mostly the Common Lisp and the Scheme variety) There is also the issue where are a lot of areas like UX and tooling requires boring engineering work that no wants to put in. Dependency management, language servers, static analysis etc. Scheme is stuck in academia; its creators are more interested in forcing language constructs like Continuation Passing Style onto end users rather than fixing ecosystem problems. Despite having a multitude of standards, every Scheme has to roll its own dependency manager. Chicken libraries aren't directly compatible with Gambit and good luck with Racket's licensing. Quicklisp is relatively recent and a lot of books that are considered "standard reading" are so old that they don't mention it. Simple things like exporting a binary using save-image-and-die etc. don't work properly, easy Rust/Go style cross platform compilation support is almost non-existent and the whole process is extremely flaky in general. Stuff like Roswell improves the UI a bit but the underlying foundation is extremely barebones. Now most of these problems would go away with proper funding. But the major users of Lisp tend to be small niche companies in areas like natural language processing and quantum computing. They are not Sun, they are not Google. They never had to onboard a tremendous amount of new people in a short time. They have their pick of a community with too much supply and not enough demand. The people in charge of using them are happy to stay within the safe walls of Emacs and tradition, expecting all newcomers to do the same. They are not gonna drop a couple million of investment to fund tooling and infrastructure. Even with Clojure where you have new editors and tooling the language authors are infamous for being reluctant to address user needs and concerns at a core level. Forget about a language whose ANSI standard has never seen an update for 2 decades and whose improvements are fueled by a hodgepodge of mildly incompatible language extensions and macros. Sure there are two new compiler projects in CL that are coming along nicely, but they are not dedicating the attention to UX that languages like Elixir do. The CL21 project looks nice on paper but never caught on, and everyone is happy to push for more compiler implementations instead. A lot of the compilation and ecosystem stuff that are really important such as mobile, Web, GUIs etc. are tied to proprietary software. Sure the situation is improving with electron and I heard that the Qt binding is slightly better these days but the language situation resembles more to closed sourced relics like Embarcadero Delphi than the highly vaulted insane-productivity-startup-secret-weapon that HN seem to give the impression of.