See also advertising. C++ and Java had enormous advertising budgets, while Common Lisp had virtually none. For years, virtually every programming book and magazine was touting C++ and then later Java. Every conference, every keynote, everything a CTO might ever read or notice was telling them to use C++ or Java.
C++ itself never had a marketing budget! The nearest you might find is marketing for implementations back when people paid for programming languages, but the only surviving one of those is really Visual Studio.
Lisp has had decades to break out of its niche if it delivered a really advantageous solution, but somehow that never happened.
> Lisp has had decades to break out of its niche if it delivered a really advantageous solution, but somehow that never happened.
I think a huge part of it is that it is not immediately obvious that one needs what Lisp offers, and by the time the system has grown to the extent that the need is obvious, it has also grown to the extent that one no longer sees the fores for the trees. One doesn’t think ‘oh man, I need garbage collection’; one thinks, ‘oh man, I need to manage malloc and free better!’. One doesn’t think, ‘oh man, dynamic scope would really fit this problem well’; one thinks ‘oh man, I need dependency injection.’ Peter Norvig famously noted that 16 of the original 23 design patterns were invisible or simpler in dynamic languages such as Lisp†. Heck, there was a time when one couldn’t rely on recursion, or even conditionals! But the programmer who has managed to get stuff done without recursion, or without conditionals, or without macros doesn’t really see the point. He’s even worried: those things may add too much expressivity to the language. Why, folks could write unmaintainable code with them!
Of course, folks write unmaintainable code without them, too …
Anyway, I think a huge issue is one of education and experience. Ours is a massively growing field. The vast majority of folks are juniors, and don’t know any better; a portion of their education was miseducation. The seniors often have one year of experience, twenty times (rather than twenty years of experience). Objective standards are rare to nonexistent. Norms and standards are absent.
But yeah, when I’m working on a large project in a language other than Lisp, I often think, ‘man, this would be so much easier in Lisp!’ or even ‘man, this would be practical in Lisp!’ (because anything is possible in a Turing-complete language …).
Yes, and whose advertisements do you think show up in every single one of those magazines? Which implementations get mentioned by every single C++ book? Which organization sponsored every single C++ conference? Don’t forget that they had stiff competition from the advertising budgets of other large companies, such as Oracle and IBM.
Also, don’t forget that Lisp machines were once the most coveted development machines on the market. But Symbolics had to develop not only the language and IDE, but also the OS, the hardware, the microcode, and everything else all at once. It’s pretty telling that they soon began running Unix (on a separate processor) and then their next product was an add–in card for an Apple Macintosh II containing a Lisp processor ASIC. By then the C++ hype train was gathering steam and the AI winter had begun. Symbolics didn’t survive, and their direct competitor LMI had even less chance. So it’s not that Lisp offers no advantages, it’s just that market conditions killed off the companies that were offering it. Note that these market conditions were created by advertising and shifting public perception.
I thus return to my thesis, which is that the market success of a language has little, if anything, to do with the advantages of the language. Instead marketing and advertising rule the day.
> But Symbolics had to develop not only the language and IDE, but also the OS, the hardware, the microcode, and everything else all at once
This was forty years ago. Doing LISP advocacy like this just makes people sound like they're that Japanese guy who refused to surrender until the 1970s. The world has moved on; there have been other opportunities; and LISP has not won them either.
The timeframe doesn’t matter. What matters is that C++ triumphed not because it was a better language, but because it was sold better. It had better advertising.
I was going to disagree with you, until I re-read and noticed the word "intrinsic".
I would say that language popularity is highly correlated with the actual usefulness of the language. But "actual usefulness" covers far more than the "intrinsic qualities" of the language. It also covers the scope and quality of the standard libraries, the third-party libraries, the available tools like compilers, IDEs, and debuggers (which may be third-party), available documentation and training, and people available to hire who know the language. Of those items I listed, the only parts that could be considered "intrinsic" are the standard libraries and the tooling that comes with the language by default.
