Lisp may hav been ahead of its time but it never really caught on. Never went main stream. Lispers capitalised on its obscurity to make it even more racist. But lispers never really tried to market lisp to the main stream market. If they did its adoption rate wudve increased,instead they formed a cult around lisp where initiates were indoctrinated to regard anybody who didnt code in lisp as not very smart.
Too many artcles by lispers carry this tone of elite superiority about them.
Some coders attracted by the mystique of lisp and d arrogance of d average lisp clawed their way into d lisp gang. Well, d rest of wrld moved on ignoring lisp .
Then paul graham wrote his web app in lisp made some money and brought lisp to d limelight again with his essays but he too cudnt shake d condescension out of his write ups.
For one, lisp was too cumbersome to get into. You had to be a decent emacs user. Wat if u dont care abt emacs? Ur in a bad spot. This is nothg short of shabby marketg. All other recent languages made usage easy. Java: any text editor and the compiler.
C#,vb - visual studio + free compiler downloads for any language. Python : idle,
lisp! ? Smh.
Y didnt lispers simply make an easy to use version? They were too busy wrshpg lisp for tht.
How is a lisp program packaged and deployed? Nobody knew.
Lisp has too many silly parentheses , learners complained
. The complaints were swept aside and the idiosyncrasies were justified.
Wat ar all these odd soundg syntax names like apropos,car,cadr,cadadr, speak english man. This was again swept under d rug. A customer knows an inconsiderate seller is bad business. The algol wrld left lisp behind and it withered in its
niches.
Recently some1 with a lil more wisdom re visited the lisp issue re vamping lisp and marketg it properly to the mainstream and contrary to d crappy assumption tht the average c-like programmer is too dumb to grok lisp, many hav been won over and investgated lisp.
This version is clojure. The wrk of rich hickey.
First, he built it on established technology,the jvm. No more ugly routes to usage via emacs.
He, targeted a large group of programmers - java programmers.
He made clojure interoperable with their language speedg up its adoption. If clojure succeeds it will b because of the viral marketg of the java converts. Without java clojure wudve failed.
He made usage easy and accessible. Inbuilt REPL , like python and ruby , and unlike former lisp versions makes lisp more familiar and adoptable.
If clojure succeeds it will b because somebody sold it to the wrld more smartly than the other lisp advocates did.

Agreed, though I would say it never caught on because it focused on features that industry programmers didn't care about at all.

You may be right kambo. Lisp has had a bad history. Rich Hickey is simply brilliant and had some foresight in making Clojure run on the JVM instead of on a new platform. Clojure is truly awesome and puts Lisp in a new light. I hope it gets used more. Who wouldn't want to write this?

(defn blank? [str]
(every? #(Character/isWhitespace %) str))

instead of this

public static boolean isBlank(String str) {
int strLen;
if (str == null || (strLen = str.length()) == 0) {
return true;
}
for (int i = 0; i < strLen; i++) {
if ((Character.isWhitespace(str.charAt(i)) == false)) {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}