Comment by kazinator

Nothing that was based on garbage collection picked up a lot of users before 1999 or so.

Basically when the world "rebooted" into garbage collected, managed languages, it was amid a sort of Lisp amnesia. A lot of that was due to new people who had no such memory to recall.

Prior to this general movement, there were severe barriers in place against anything memory-managed.

And anyway, even if everyone who had already been programming in 1980 switched to Lisp today, it would be a drop in the bucket.

I think the original Lisp people didn't persevere enough. They peaked early. By the time Java and whatnot came around, the presence wasn't there.