[gibsonf1]

I think Lisp is simply the right choice for great applications, whether entrepreneur driven or otherwise. For Corporations, if the managers don't understand the value of Lisp, they will opt for different solutions, even if those solutions destroy the value that Lisp offered. Perhaps the only barrier to wider Lisp adoption is an education barrier?

[mdakin]

I have personally seen Lisp stamped out for political reasons. I had been tasked with generating C code from a textual description of a finite state machine. With my boss's permission (also a Lisp programmer) I used scheme to take in the descriptions and output C code. It hooked right into the Makefiles and worked well. Despite the fact that the solution worked and that there were several engineers on staff who were Lisp programmers this did not make it through review. A senior engineer who had been with the company for a long time (who'd never programmed in Lisp) had major objections. He pulled the right strings and we were forced to reimplement it all in C. I suspect one of real problems for Lisp is the presence of this sort of anti-Lisp person in the industry.

[ralph]

If you had to reimplement in C then it suggests that whatever non-C language the original was in, e.g. Python, you would have had to re-write it in C. Otherwise, you would have had the choice to reimplement your Lisp in a more suitable language than C that was acceptable. Lisp here seems a side issue.

[mdakin]

You are probably correct. There were snide remarks made about Lisp in particular however, like claiming it is not "used in industry" and is thus "nonstandard". Similar remarks could have been made against any language the guy DIDN'T know. Regardless of the reasoning there are people like this who end up stamping Lisp (and other non-dominant solutions) out.

[brlewis]

Yes, it's an education barrier. BRL (Scheme adapted for web apps) has survived numerous attempts to quash it at my employer over the past 7 years, as different managers have needed educating.

The other education barrier is with programmers. The "Wow, this is simple and useful!" response comes in 15 minutes using Python or Ruby. With Scheme or CL it comes in a week or two, though it's stronger. I don't know if s-expr notation will ever have immediate appeal, or if it needs to grow on everybody.