[cageface]

Programming languages are cultural, not technical, artifacts.

Sociology is a factor but that's wildly overstating the case. The fact that people prefer to borrow from Lisp rather that adopt it is telling. Many programmers are aware enough of Lisp to take inspiration from it but choose not to use the language itself.

There's a subtext of arrogance in the claims FP and Lisp advocates make about the popularity of various programming languages. In my experience most of those people don't actually write much code. I gave up on the Common Lisp community years ago after realizing that it was full of people that would rather sit around discussing how things should be than actually building something.

Clay Shirky talks about people knocking out an important app in 2 days PHP here: http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_w...

I doubt very much that the typical Lisp crowd would have gotten past arguing which web templating library to use.

[sedachv]

"Sociology is a factor but that's wildly overstating the case."

And how does anything you wrote after this sentence not support my argument?