Lispers
The home page looks like a tombstone of Common Lisp with a bunch of epitaphs on it.<p>On the other hand, the spirit of Lisp has successfully taken over the world. The modern Lisp is called JavaScript.<p>I am perfectly aware of all the differences between Lisp and JavaScript and of the other languages that have influenced JavaScript (Self, Perl, Lua), but think of this: what made Lisp so great in the past?<p><pre><code>    - automatic memory management (compared to Fortran&#x2F;C);
    - very dynamic language and environment,
      hooks on everything, live systems;
      `eval`, available meta-interpreter;
    - exceptions and condition system instead of segfaults;
    - multi-paradigm, flexible programming language: 
      functional, OO and imperative programming when needed;
    - research roots and great minds behind the language;
</code></pre>
What JavaScript has fixed compared to Lisps?<p>JavaScript has fixed S-expressions; &quot;I can program in S-expressions&quot; does not mean &quot;I should&quot;. Macros are harmful to programming in the large.<p>JavaScript applied existing lessons about data structures and object systems to the language: &quot;I can roll out my own object system&quot; does not mean &quot;I should&quot; and creates a Babel tower of incompatible object systems instead of a common language. JavaScript got rid of linked lists (that are awkward and impractical for everyday use) and introduced hash-tables into the language.<p>The modern JS ecosystem seems to be exactly what a Common Lisp ecosystem would have been if it had existed in the first place: the same diversity, the same problems, the same churn rate (because the language is powerful and writing new stuff is easy).<p>JavaScript has also successfully escaped perception of &quot;a language for brains&quot;. Research background is actually harmful for a modern programming language. Examples are abound: Haskell is widely derided by the industry, slightly researchy Scala is &quot;borderline unmanageable&quot; for many and teams move back to Java; C++ with its experiments is tolerated for its interoperability with C, but gets a lot of (deserved) hate for its (often unnecessary) complication (hopefully, Rust has a good cover for the industry as &quot;enhanced C++&quot;); simplistic Go takes the world over by storm; the web is mostly written in PHP, whose inventors are as far from PL research as one can get.