I’m aware of all these facts but Lisp wasn’t practical except on Lisp machines for quite a long time, and most of these languages only started running on microc

I’m aware of all these facts but Lisp wasn’t practical except on Lisp machines for quite a long time, and most of these languages only started running on microcomputers in the mid to late 80s. Caml Light, (Xavier Leroy) the standardization of ML, object oriented scripting languages, etc. My initial statement was too strong, what I meant to say was that the higher level languages were not practical for commodity application development and distribution until more recently. They’ve been along for a very long time but Smalltalk is an infamously isolated system and it was very slow even when running on an Alto (I’ve used it!). I admittedly know much less about the practical history of Scheme and Prolog.