In short, the Julia ecosystem is not a Lisp ecosystem.
If you wanted Lisp, you'd be far better off using a real Lisp to begin with, so you can unreservedly participate in an entire Lisp ecosystem, instead of using a language that hides its Lispyness behind a Python-like syntax.
Possibly those people will even do something like Clojure for the Julia compiler (a mature version of [1]), with an entire community around it so you don't have to worry about doing "unacceptably lispy" code (and it will certainly interop much better than Clojure and Java).
The reason is pretty clear. Mainstream programmers are just allergic to Lisp syntax.
They don't like all the parenthesis, and want a more Algol-like syntax (which, these days, and especially for the users who Julia is trying to attract, means a more Python-like syntax).
Lisp for a lot of developers also has an old, stale feel to it. Programming is dominated by fads, and most programmers (especially younger ones) want instead to chase the new shiny.
Decades ago, I read that there were already something like 4,000 languages. I expect in another couple of decades there'll be 4,000 more, with every new generation of developers eager to jump on the bandwagon of yet another new language.
Python, once the new kid on the block dethroning Perl, is now itself considered to be kind of old and stale, so people are looking for the new thing. Maybe Julia is it!
Emacs allows you to substitute any text for any other when viewing a document, so you can pretty much do the same in Emacs for any language.
I did this when editing LaTeX papers full of logic symbols, which Emacs would display as the symbols themselves rather than as the underlying LaTeX markup.
It could do the same for Lisp or any other language.
Do you have a reference or search term for that? My Google-fu is failing me.
Of course if you want to build your own (mega-) fortress all by yourself, Lisp is the language to go to. Most people and stakeholder prefer not to.
See Sec 6.2 "Julia: dynamism and performance reconciled by design" in https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3276490.
If you want to make CL exist in a commercial driven world.. make a successful CL business, that's the only thing this soil understands.
ps: viaweb was ages ago, it was cool and famous and world didn't care. Social structures are odd and people want to belong to their own cult, php, js, python were a 'better' fit for the uneducated people of that time, now they are the world and still only care about their own little world. Until they get a new idea, which they now see the value of and will integrate them shamelessly. CL nowhere to be found. It's a sad fact of life, CL heads don't have the desire to dominate, so their language features will be assimilated silently.
Julia is a Lisp.
For this to happen they have to turn their view of lisp from beauty to an effective tool to win on pragmatic points: time to develop, number of bugs, ease of adaptability. CL has a hammer for all this points but you have to see the field that way and produce things.. well basically 'less is more' vs 'perfectionism'
If a Lisper had come up with Jupyter notebooks before Python did, they could have captured the interest of academia.
If they'd come out with a Ruby On Rails framework before Ruby did, they could have made inroads in to the web development community.
That is, of course, if you could somehow get developers to embrace all the parenthesis, which seem to be an albatross around Lisp's neck that it can never shake.
Lisp does have one killer app, though: Emacs.
Jupyter notebooks are web based, and only require a web browser to use. That's not the case for org.
Using org effectively also means using Emacs, which is a high barrier of entry for most people.
Jupyter notebooks have no such requirements, and anyone can get rolling by just installing some packages and opening a web browser.
Jupyter notebooks are also really polished, while org is more bare bones visually.
Jupyter notebooks also have all these tools integrated in to it (all the graphing and inline image display tools are particularly appealing)
Yes, you could potentially do all of these with org, but it'd take way more knowledge and setup than is required for Jupyter notebooks.
If something as visually appealing, powerful, and easy to set up and use for people who don't know Emacs then it'd have a chance of getting widespread adoption. But that's not org.
Notebooks are only a thing because you don't need to install anything on work laptops and get around terrible IT policies.
They can't. They are all busy implementing another Lisp in Lisp.