Be careful; my quote has nothing to do with the confusion between lemons and limes that occurred hundreds of years later. The Navy instituted a lime juice ration in 1799. They switched out lemons ("limes") for what we would call limes in 1865, setting themselves up for the reintroduction of scurvy. But James Lancaster performed his experiment (and reported his result of 100% scurvy prevention to Naval authorities) in 1601.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28040748
-- US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health
"Clasp: Common Lisp using LLVM and C++ for Designing Molecules"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rSMt1pAlbE
-- GoogleTechTalks
Think of studies where you:
a) have statistically representative sample size (100+ developers)
b) actual numbers and compare them (the average development time needed for the Java/C++/etc. applications was Y and the average development time needed for Lisp applications was Y - Z, where Z > 0, etc.; the average execution time for Java/C++/etc. applications, etc., you get the idea)
Computer Science studies are still in their infancy.
All this Lisp hype is just hype and gut feelings.
1. That was before the scientific age. They didn't know about vitamin C at the time, they couldn't even see it, even if they'd somehow believe in it.
2. There is no scientific proof, 0, none, that Lisp is superior. And it's almost impossible to prove it, since it requires controlled studies at a large scale - good luck with taking away hundreds of productive programmers for that study :) All we have is hearsay and personal opinions.