That's just the latest in a long list of languages. This is a process that has been going on for nearly as long as lisp has existed - so nearly as long as people have been programming.
That's appeal to popularity. At least lisp is strongly typed. JS happened to be created first, and the world was stuck with it as Web grew and no other alternatives came out.
We may study this document to help us understand what it was about Lisp and its user community that made Lisp untenable as a production language. Javascript suffers from all of Lisp's technical awkwardnesses, and many more, but became a mainstream language anyway.
I was really sad that Lisp didn't take off like it appeared it might in the early 2000s. With Practical Common Lisp[1], Yegge's articles and Edi Weitz's software[2], as well as other articles and resources available at the time, it really looked as though the programming world was beginning to get why Lisp is such a good idea.
And then the focus became JavaScript, which has all of the bad and many—but not nearly all—of the good points of Lisp, and one key differentiator: it runs in the browser, on effectively every computer, tablet and phone on the planet.
Maybe the Lisp-compiled-to-JavaScript efforts will help.
5 years ago I would have bet on Lisp being replaced by JS. JS has a lot of advanced features, especially for functional programming, but nobody really uses it that way in production or teaches it that way.
"I chose the language which exists" doesn't apply to the people in 1994 who could have had /thirty-five years/ of LISP experience (potentially) and yet still chose to write another language, in another language. And when Brendan Eich was in college around 1981, the tutors there could have had /twenty years/ of LISP experience, but weren't there to convince him that it was amazing.
Same with literally any language dating post-LISP, and I note that that covers most languages which are popular today.
"Programmers don't pick rationally" is fine on the small scale, but accross the entire industry, even among people who do love exploring programming languages, even among young entrepreneurial risk takers, even among companies in tough markets angling for any and every edge they can get over their competitors, in decade after decade, over problem domain after problem domain after problem domain, there is this empty howling wasteland of happy and productive people using not-LISP, writing world-conquering systems that do just-fine-thanks and the claimed benefits of LISP just don't seem to be making any noticable dent in anything.
Oh my gosh. When are people going to give up and just admit that Lisp (=lisp-family) just wins? The list of dead contenders for The One True language is breathtakingly long, but it's Lisp that everyone eventually comes back around to. Even in the last decade we went thru PERL then Pyhton and now it's js. And everyone just keeps adding in more and more lisp to their language du jour (d'annee?) until, well, they just give up and build a lisp on top of it, like Clojure or Hy. Please let's just come together and get to where we've been headed for 50 years anyway.
In other words, the slow march for all languages to eventually become Lisp continues...
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