Different businesses have different criteria to evaluate their tools by. OCaml has had some limited success in the financial market, and I think Scheme may have

Different businesses have different criteria to evaluate their tools by. OCaml has had some limited success in the financial market, and I think Scheme may have as well, due in part to the ease with which high performance code can be written that closely mirrors the formulas they're used to working in anyway. For your run of the mill business, ease of finding developers to do the work, and ease of finding maintenance developers not just today but 10 years from now is a much larger consideration. In addition for publicly traded companies (or management that's too weak to stand up for their choices) picking a "accepted" language to do their work in offers a certain degree of deniability should the project fail (the outdated joke about no one ever getting fired for choosing IBM seems appropriate here). I think, when it comes down to it, the relative merits of the language itself are actually a fairly minor consideration for most businesses, they simply go with one of the industry standards because it involves the least risk on their part. The only way I see that changing is if more companies take a strong stand and publicly push less popular languages into the spotlight and make a strong case for the advantages you can see by embracing them.