Well, you usually don't choose languages based on their technical merits, but rather on the ecosystems around them. These depend on popularity which you get by having traction, which you get by being quickly productive. This is why very tolerant or very familiar languages succeed. Being chosen as one of the blessed languages that are taught in universities is also, of course, priceless. A killer framework (Hello, Ruby) can also do wonders.

Not that this defends the very poor syntactical choices that Lisp and Haskell and their communities have done (minimal grammar is not a good thing! One-symbol names are horrible!), but a lack of popularity is not as damning as it sounds.

> Well, you usually don't choose languages based on their technical merits, but rather on the ecosystems around them

Ecosystem is part of technical merit, but I'd agree that in many cases (particularly non-software firms), languages aren't chosen by technical merit (including ecosystem), but for social reasons.

I can't bet for everything, but a lot of sophistication has been put into making Fortran, C, and Java very fast and efficient, for different but meaningful values of "efficient". They are very sharp tools, if not most elegant.

> Meanwhile the "weapons for a civilized time" such as Lisp or Haskell haven't really gotten a major hold in either a Fortune 1000 company or the software giants on the West Coast.

Last I checked, the list of publicly acknowledged production Haskell uses included several significant ones in Fortune 1000 firms, and various Lisps have seen production use at major firms, both inside and outside the software industry.

Sure, Haskell and Lisp (and APL and any other language you care to mention) is used somewhere, in some Fortune 1000 company, but that's a far cry from having gotten a major hold. Just because a group of futures traders in one HSBC office use Haskell to price a certain type of future you cannot really say the Haskell has a major hold at HSBC.