Why isn't LISP more widely used?

Posted by Chris on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chris
Published on 2008-09-19T22:45:47Z Indexed on 2010/04/03 16:03 UTC
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subjective

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lisp

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programming-languages

I've heard a lot of people espouse the capabilities of LISP and its omnipotent macros. If LISP is such a great language, why isn't it being adopted more? What problems is LISP facing that is holding it back from (re)emerging as popular language? Is it something about LISP itself ("those brackets!" isn't the answer, is it?!), or its competitors (e.g. the dominance of Java, .NET)?

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