[jhbadger]

On the other hand, if it were lispiness that was the issue, surely xlispstat would be the winner. I love xlispstat. I used it in grad school in the 1990s and even maintain the github repository https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat . But the fact is xlispstat never appealed to the general statistical community and R did.

[dm319]

I thought xlispstat was a big deal in statistics at its peak? I suppose both R and xlispstat are (to varying degrees) lisp-based, so another way of looking at it is that statisticians like lisp?

[jhbadger]

I don't think it got as much popularity in its day as R does now, but it was popular to a degree. But that was also because at the time it was pretty much the only free statistics programming environment -- at the time the choice was either xlispstat or pay for a licence for S-PLUS, SAS, or the like.