Ok, here I think you need to look at history rather than the languages themselves. Once Lisp (and Smalltalk, for different reasons) became branded as failures, that reputation was fixed in 90+% of people's minds, and it remains so. This is all the more entrenched because of the bias in favor of the newest things in computing. For most people, that a 40-year old failure might be better than something new and popular just isn't possible.

So, you think it's a legacy of the AI winter?

Sure, among other things (like "it's too slow").

That view is remarkably well entrenched. On the last team I worked in, before coming to JTV, we were talking about the big Java project we were working on. I said if I had my way it would have been written in Common Lisp. Many on the team thought that was hilarious. One guy's response was "yeah, maybe if we had a supercomputer!"

For what its worth, that's probably a pretty good sign that they don't really understand what makes languages slow. (Or that they in "cheap shot" mode.)

Weird, as I was browsing the language shootout, I got the impression that SBCL produces damn fast code, in most cases comparable to the code emited by GCC or Java 6.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...

Yeah, that's the point. It's damn fast now. The "too slow" meme is from decades ago.

Notice that you're looking at SBCL 0.9.16

Notice that there are more up-to-date measurements available from the homepage

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/