I recently discovered the Lisp family of programming languages, and it's definitely one of the more diverse and widespread families in the programming language world. I like Elisp because that most wonderful tool Emacs is an Elisp interpreter.
But I was looking for one more Lisp dialect to learn and thought Clojure would be the obvious choice nowadays - until I discovered the well hidden gem PicoLisp. That must be the most intelligent programming environment I have ever seen, like taking the best ideas from Lisp and Smalltalk and adding performance and practicability - and the beauty of parsimony. There is even an Emacs-mode for it. PicoLisp must be the productivity world champion when it comes to building business applications with database and web-client - and that's a very common task. It seems that throwing more and more hardware cores at your PicoLisp application makes it faster and faster, and the database is very performant anyway.
However, reactions to PicoLisp in in general mailing-lists etc. are almost hostile (envy?), and there is absolutely no hype and very little publicity (ie not one book published).
Are there real justified reasons for this (except the vast amount of java-libs accessible by Clojure, I know that one)? Or is the mainstream it getting wrong again (see C vs Lisp, Java vs Smalltalk, Windows vs Linux) and will come to the conclusion 10 years later that the JVM was good as in between solution, but a really fast Lisp interpreter on multicore machines is much better and allows much cleaner concepts?
PS 1:
Please note: I'm not interested in Scheme or any Common Lisp dialect, although they might be fine languages. It's just PicoLisp vs Clojure.
PS 2: another thing I like about PicoLisp is its similarity to Elisp in certain aspects (both are descendants from MacLisp?) - it's easier to learn two similar languages. There is so much "dynamic binding bashing" on the web, but two of the most appealing Lisp applications use it.
