There was an article posted here a while ago that made the case that Lisp is so powerful that it makes it feasible to do much more yourself rather than relying on libraries, and thus it attracts a higher level of hacker that wants to do things their own way and is more intolerant of compromises made in the name of standardization. Sort of the opposite of the lowest common denominator approach of successful enterprise languages like Java. The failure to thrive of Common Lisp is strong evidence of the worse-is-better phenomenon.
I would say this is also highly driven by non-hackers. Many schools are nothing more than Java certification shops and many companies select technologies pushed through salespeople.
I'm fairly sure languages such as Lisp and SmallTalk would be much more widespread today if the industry wasn't told what to use by clueless people driven by profits.
Interestingly, looking within the Lisp hacker community, individual hackers seem to be doing quite well. It seems as though the language is geared towards empowering the individual. Even though Lisp is hard to learn, once you 'get it' the pay-off seems to be rather large.
Couldn't agree more on that one. When given a task, people who take programming just as a job will look for a open source project to hack around and taylor it to do a job, instead of doing the hard implementation by themselves.
