Why don't people like lisp?

[Terry Reedy]

"Francis Avila" <francisgavila at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:voobanm4rs7p68 at corp.supernews.com...
> "Christian Lynbech" <christian.lynbech at ericsson.com> wrote in
message
> > It is still a question of heated debate what actually killed the
lisp
> > machine industry.
>
> I think what helped kill the lisp machine was probably lisp: many
people
> just don't like lisp, because it is a very different way of thinking
that
> most are rather unaccustomed to.

My contemporaneous impression, correct or not, as formed from
miscellaneous mentions in the computer press and computer shows, was
that they were expensive, slow, and limited -- limited in the sense of
being specialized to running Lisp, rather than any language I might
want to use.  I can understand that a dedicated Lisper would not
consider Lisp-only to be a real limitation, but for the rest of us...

If these impressions are wrong, then either the publicity effort was
inadequate or the computer press misleading.  I also never heard of
any 'killer ap' like Visicalc was for the Apple II.  Even if there had
been, I presume that it could have been ported to others workstations
and to PCs -- or imitated, just as spreadsheets were (which removed
Apple's temporary selling point).

Terry J. Reedy