I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s much explanatory power here at all, actually.<p>Some of the most popular languages today, from a web development perspective at least, are JavaScript, Ruby, and Clojure.<p>One of them is an actual Lisp with full-blown macros and a lot of Emacs users.<p>The others are also extremely expressive, dynamic, and amenable to metaprogramming.<p>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a single, simple, beautiful explanation for why Common Lisp isn&#x27;t more widely used. Mostly it just has an undeserved bad reputation... partly because articles like this show up all the time, reinforcing the stigma of Lisp as a weird language for bipolar geniuses, or whatever.