You have to remember that HN users aren't a representative subset of software developers world-wide. Part of that may be the continuing influence of PG: I both

You have to remember that HN users aren't a representative subset of software developers world-wide. Part of that may be the continuing influence of PG: I both learnt Lisp and found HN because of his essays, and I suspect I'm not the only one. But also, the HN community generally has an academic fondness for new and niche languages, so a language's popularity on HN is a poor proxy for its popularity in the business world. (A last point: I think the diminished importance of Lisp in the last decades is less due to an inherent flaw of the language and more to what you might call "accidents of history" - particularly its close association with early attempts at AI.)