[bitwize]

The Lisp machine failed because Lisp compiler technology got better and better at targeting generic 32-bit CPU hardware, which was becoming increasingly cheap and plentiful. So the benefits of having all this custom hardware to specially execute Lisp code were nullified -- leaving only the costs.

The same thing happened to Java in hardware. It seemed like a good idea at the time because it allowed developers to target a language they were already familiar with, and present an alternative to Wintel -- especially when you realize that Java was all the rage as a sort of universal programming environment, and in particular J2ME was a big deal for proto-"smart" phones before the iPhone came along. But embedded Java didn't really pan out, memory and CPU time got cheaper, and compiler and JIT tech improved to the point where there was just no benefit to adding the hardware it took to decode Java instructions. So Jazelle was deprecated and replaced with something called ThumbEE, which was a more generic framework based on ARM's Thumb instruction set for running code for an abstract machine, providing features like automatic null-pointer checking and that. Like you could set up a ThumbEE environment for running Python or .NET code in addition to Java. Nowadays even ThumbEE is deprecated. Neither feature appears in ARMv8 processors, for instance.