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.
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.