My hypothesis has nothing to do with Lisp itself, per-se:
People simply stopped paying attention because of the failed promises of AI - and in a nod to the parent, some of the talent base probably shifted to other technologies, and Lisp was left without an ecosystem. It's starting to build up again.
Beautiful case-in-point: I went to a developer's conference yesterday put on by one of the big software vendors that my company buys from. I was carrying a copy of PG's excellent On Lisp to read during dead times. Having that book out in the open started several conversations with people I wouldn't have met, incidentally. Each of those conversations went something like this:
He: Lisp! Who uses that anymore? Didn't that die out a long time ago?
Me: Well, it was big during the 80's because of AI, but it's in the middle of a comeback that started sometime around 2000.
He: really!? I thought it was a dead language. Who uses it?
Me: There are a few companies out there that use it. There are even commercial offerings of Lisp tools. There's Franz, Inc. which sells AllegroCL, for example. There are two or three others I can think of off the top of my head. There are some open source projects that are very active, too.
He: but it's just a scripting language, right?
Me: No, it's really a general-purpose programming language that can be used for any number of things. It's currently being used for writing web applications, among other things, but it could be used to write any kind of software, really. Whether or not it is interpreted or compiled is dependent on the implementation and how you want to use it.
People simply stopped paying attention because of the failed promises of AI - and in a nod to the parent, some of the talent base probably shifted to other technologies, and Lisp was left without an ecosystem. It's starting to build up again.
Beautiful case-in-point: I went to a developer's conference yesterday put on by one of the big software vendors that my company buys from. I was carrying a copy of PG's excellent On Lisp to read during dead times. Having that book out in the open started several conversations with people I wouldn't have met, incidentally. Each of those conversations went something like this:
He: Lisp! Who uses that anymore? Didn't that die out a long time ago?
Me: Well, it was big during the 80's because of AI, but it's in the middle of a comeback that started sometime around 2000.
He: really!? I thought it was a dead language. Who uses it?
Me: There are a few companies out there that use it. There are even commercial offerings of Lisp tools. There's Franz, Inc. which sells AllegroCL, for example. There are two or three others I can think of off the top of my head. There are some open source projects that are very active, too.
He: but it's just a scripting language, right?
Me: No, it's really a general-purpose programming language that can be used for any number of things. It's currently being used for writing web applications, among other things, but it could be used to write any kind of software, really. Whether or not it is interpreted or compiled is dependent on the implementation and how you want to use it.