Comment by kazinator

Lisp became incredibly popular at one point. It spawned so much productivity that it created huge programs that used lots of memory and demanded expensive hardware.

This peaked at a time when microcomputers had not reached the right affordability and power parameters.

People who were developing in Lisp turned their eyes to the microcomputer market and the business to be had there, if the stuff would only run. So there was some activity of rewriting Lisp stuff in languages like Bliss and C.

The transition from powerful workstations (where we can count Lisp machines) to microcomputers basically destroyed everything which couldn't make the jump nimbly.

The new crop of programmers who cut their teeth on micros simply had no knowledge or experience with anything that didn't run on micros.

Poof, just like that, a chunk of the computing sphere consisting of new people suddenly had amnesia about Cobol, Fortran, Snobol, PL/I, operating systems like TOPS/20 and VMS and whatnot.

Only Unix pulled through, pretty much --- and that's because Unix started on relatively weak hardware, and was kept small. Unix started getting complicated approximately in step with micro hardware getting more complicated and powerful. E.g. a Unix kernel was around 50 kilobytes in 1980. not a good fit for some Apple II or Commodore Pet, but not far off from the resources the IBM PC would have.

By the time micros were powerful enough to the huge Lisp stuff with 20 megabyte images, we were into the 90s, and starting to be overrun with crap dynamic languages.

Now Lisp people could have buckled down and worked on promoting excellent Lisps for microcomputers. There were a few fledgling efforts like that that were not promoted well.

It seems that what Lisp programmers there were, they were mostly wrapped up working on bigger problems on larger hardware, and ignored microcomputers.

It's very hard to promote anything today that most of your Generation X (now management class) didn't get to play with in the 80s and 90s.