Lisp refactoring puzzle

[fortunatus]

I think the problem with so-called "forward looking" or "highest
level" languages is that they tend to become domain specific.  What
Lispers are always saying is construct your own high level language
out of your favorite Lisp.  Of course no one else will use it then, or
even discuss it, unless you have some good buddies.

What happens is that high level languages don't end up addressing
needs across a large community.  The lower down languages can be
common denominators across wide swaths of programmers.  So we live in
this world of roll-your-own on top of the common denominator language.

One exception to this is in data base development, where there were
some "4th generation" languages that had some success, where the needs
of mapping business data models onto data base oriented implementation
has had a large community.

I guess Mathematica, or MatLab in my environment, also address a
community of needs for modelling mathematical algorithms, or for doing
analysis of data sets.

However both the data base field and the math/arithmetic tool field
are examples of domains that are narrower than programming in
general.  Hence those higher level languages could be seen as domain
specific, but for domains with lots of users.