Why Lisp Failed (2010)
It&#x27;s difficult to agree with the idea that VB displaced COBOL. Even if this were the case, it certainly wasn&#x27;t because COBOL compilers were expensive compared to &quot;a cheap interpreter&quot; that came with the machine. COBOL compilers surely were expensive, but they were also intended for mainframes rather than PCs. Also, I don&#x27;t remember VB ever coming packaged with Windows for free. VB has been a part of Visual Studio for as long as I can remember and I don&#x27;t believe there was a free version of until around VS2005.<p>Lisp, it turns out, is a weird and challenging language. It takes a little extra before you start to see the exciting bits. Unfortunately, until you reach that point, it&#x27;s a matter of struggling with the parts around it - namely the editor. Lisp and Emacs go hand in hand, and while today you can rely on other editors to competently work with Lisp code, 20 years ago I don&#x27;t think this was the case.<p>So now a user has to pick up Lisp (challenging when viewed through the lenses of either VB and COBOL) and Emacs (positively baroque if your only experience is within a GUI and IDE). I&#x27;d venture to guess that getting a functional Lisp environment running on a 286&#x2F;386 era PC was probably a challenge in itself for most people.<p>Now consider VB or Java, significantly more familiar languages that didn&#x27;t effectively depend (at the time) on the features of their editor or IDE. Both were a mouse-click away as far as installation, and Java didn&#x27;t cost anything. Both were backed by large organizations that had a lot of incentive to invest and convince people to use their particular thing.<p>Lisp was this weird, mostly academic, language intended to tackle relatively esoteric rather than business problems, that was Unix only at a time when PCs and Windows were taking off. It doesn&#x27;t seem unusual to me that it didn&#x27;t take over the world. Frankly, I&#x27;m surprised and thankful that it&#x27;s still around, actively used, and even sporting a significant community.