So it sounds like the JPL's reason (at least the reason they gave - whether you want to believe it was some anti-Lisp conspiracy or just bad office politics is your own business) was that Lisp was too <i>big</i>. I wonder if Scheme would have been a better fit? (It was certainly around in 1988; SICP was written in 1985.)<p>There's something about Lisp that gives it a reputation as inherently individualist (as opposed to the "workers are expendable cogs" project management model that the linked article associates with Java). Same with Forth. At this point, the Lisp community seems to encourage that idea, but what in the language itself supports this?<p>I hear arguments that it's a harder language, but let's not kid ourselves. I think programming well in, say, C++ or Haskell is much, much harder. (<i>Should</i> a language be hard to use well?) Or: Lisp code is hard to read. Potentially, sure -- the readability of the code is more dependent than most languages on the developers' abilities to name things well. (Same with Forth.) You can write unmaintainable garbage in any language, though - just copy and paste things where they're used instead of naming and referencing them, give variables meaningless names, etc. Just add water and presto, <i>big ball of mud</i>. (<a href="http://www.laputan.org/mud/" rel="nofollow">http://www.laputan.org/mud/</a>) Also, most programmers are probably used to good editors handling paren balancing in any language.<p>Besides being significantly different from the main languages people are exposed to, what? All it takes for a language to be different from e.g. C/Java is to not <i>be</i> C/Java. Is it because you can create your own idioms / extensions to the core language? I also think the syntax is something of a red herring - sure, you may dislike the syntax, but I can think of popular languages that have disastrous syntaxes. (I guess Dylan could be a control group here, but I don't know anybody who has real experience with it, let alone its reputation among management.)<p>No answers, but I'd really like to know. Working on my own language, and all that.<p>Also: I'm most definitely not looking for thinly-veiled bragging about how "not everyone can handle such a superior language" either, because... come on.