[gnosis]

"Everywhere I read about the power of lisp and really want to use it. If it is so good why ain't it is used more?"

In a sense, people are using it more. A lot of features that Lisp pioneered and that used to be radical back in the day (like built-in garbage collection, lambdas, first-class functions, etc) have now been assimilated in to other languages.

As a result, many Lispish things are now pretty mainstream. Not everything about Lisp has caught on, though (yet). In particular, many people are still averse to Lisp's syntax (or lack thereof), and its many parenthesis. Because of this, they're missing out on some of Lisp's most powerful features (lack of syntax and parenthesis are features, as is Lisp's very simple macro system).

Also, a lot of people have a pretty skewed, outdated view of Lisp, often based on rumors of a bad experience with some crippled Lisp they were forced to learn in school.

Very few people who have a very negative impression of Lisp have had much experience with a modern, full-featured implementation of Common Lisp (like SBCL), or Scheme (such as Chicken or Racket).

Those that have quite frequenly describe their experience with them as enlightening and often wish they could use Lisp/Scheme on their day job.

[bitdiddle]

for sure, what folks complain about the most (syntax) is where it's power is.

I've been getting Guile recently and find the very tight integration with C to quite nice. It's like the best of both worlds

[gnosis]

When I first learned Lisp, I quickly got to the point where I "don't even see the parenthesis". Shortly after that I learned to love them, and see them (and Lisp's simple syntax as a great strength).

Now extraneous syntax, even in a half-Lisp like Clojure, seems ugly to me. It's a real pity more people don't appreciate the elegant simplicity of Lisp (and especially Scheme).

[firepoet]

Just a curiosity -- why do you call Clojure a "half-Lisp?"

[Munksgaard]

Not me, but I would guess it's because, while both Common Lisp (ie. SBCL) and Clojure are both Lisp-like languages per se, Clojure departs further from "pure" Lisp than Common Lisp, in that it replaces lists with things such as vectors in a lot of places (see defn syntax).

[jhuni]

It could also be that it is hosted on the JVM.