I don't think these things are as random as you would like to believe. A large number of people tried for a large number of years to get lisp to take off. It isn't just bad luck that lisp didn't take off, and I think this article does a good job of outlining some reasons why.
I don't have to personally know every language. Languages grow in popularity by picking up users. It is clear lisp was and is very popular with certain segments of programmers, and ever caught on with others.
> A large number of people tried for a large number of years to get lisp to take off.
You know, it was fairly popular for a time.
> I don't have to personally know every language. Languages grow in popularity by picking up users.
This is a tautology.
But let's pretend for a second what you meant to say was "Languages deserve the usership they gain in a sort of mindshare stock exchange." Then let's rewind 10 years and show you Clojure, Ruby, Java, and Javascript.
Can you ever imagine someone from 2002 picking Javascript over those alternatives? Someone sane, I mean. All praise to the pragmatism of the 'net, but Javascript's popularity is a function of its largely unrequested deployment and the failure of competing products (mostly due to artificial and non-technical business-enforced nonsense).
And yet here we are with Javascript being so popular that startups are raising $9m just to build frameworks in them. And yet by any reasonable metric Javascript is a "worse" language. The most highly-recommended starter book for javascript is "The Good Parts", because a whole lot of the language is just so bad it has to be ignored or worked around.
All we're really doing is appealing to popularity as a justification for using perceived popularity instead of real technical metrics. Which is–to some extent, anyways–fine and good; it certainly is traditional for people to do this. But let's not pretend we have access to some deeper insight while we're doing it.
Kirin, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. More of this stuff is due to luck and randomness than most people admit. We look back and find a few contributing factors, put them in a pile, and call it a theory, and believe we understand it.
But does that theory actually limit what we'd predict about the future? Does it retroactively predict all the past data that we've seen? As you pointed out, Lisp was quite popular for a bit.
What if we just said, Lisp isn't popular because it didn't get/stay lucky?
That anti-theory isn't quite as satisfying, but at least it doesn't pretend at knowledge that it doesn't have.
One really nice thing, in my opinion, about JavaScript programmers is that they don't sit around kvetching about why the wrong language won. We all know it was a fluke, but the fluke happened, and here we are, so you can either squawk about languages, or get real things done instead, and improve the tools and software that you have.
I'm afraid I have to dispute this. I'm about as dedicated a Lisper as you'll find -- learned it at the feet of Bernie Greenberg, Gerry Sussman, and David Moon in the late 1970s, and still use it when I get the chance. (Oh and I think my Symbolics machine still works, though I haven't fired it up in several years.) I was around during the time you're probably thinking of -- the AI bubble of the mid-1980s -- and even then, Lisp was the language a lot of people loved to hate, if they knew anything about it at all.
There was some interest in Lisp, to be sure, but I think "fairly popular" is putting it too strongly. It has always been a fringe language.
On another note -- it struck me the other day that if history had gone a little differently, we might be using Dylan instead of JavaScript. Oh well...
I grant it may not be quite as important in the industry, but got a lot of popularity in Academia, and some very modest inroads in the industry.
But you're right, it never had the singular popularity that Javascript, Java, or Python now enjoy. Sorry if in my haste I gave a false impression. Not what I meant to imply.
It's more of a case-in-point than a straw man. Javascript is a great example of how unpredictable language popularity can be. The implicit argument, "Languages deserve the userbase they attract," is what's under attack.
One could use Javascript to argue that while midlevel languages tend to live in a sort of meritocracy that the very top level of languages always have some sort of immensely-powerful backer that they ride on. JS rode on top of Netscape at time when they were just that powerful. Java rode on Sun. C# and Objective C are there because of their powerful backers Microsoft and Apple.
I think if they wanted to make it happen, they could. They don't seem to care to at the moment, but it's not hard to create plausible scenarios over the next few years where that changes.
I'm pretty sure the canonical example should be PHP. Javascript had a lot of things interesting about it and consistent function names. It's actually not a bad language.
I don't have to personally know every language. Languages grow in popularity by picking up users. It is clear lisp was and is very popular with certain segments of programmers, and ever caught on with others.