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?
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.