If a language is being widely used in specific existing 'legacy' projects and for people learning it to get a job in their maintenance (e.g. COBOL?), then I'd say it's dead. If during the last five years every organization considering what language to use for their new production system (as opposed to someone's toy project or learning project) chose something else, then that language apparently has no valid niche remaining and is effectively dead, being chosen only due to legacy/compatibility reasons.
Also, I'm not sure whether I'd equate Clojure with Lisp - I'd treat it as a separate language/ecosystem evolved from Lisp as it was commonly understood; I'd consider Clojure activity as evidence that "Lisp may be dead but its descendents live on".
> I'd consider Clojure activity as evidence that "Lisp may be dead but its descendents live on"
except that common/emacs lisp or scheme is certainly not dead by any measure lol
I guess you need to define "dead".
I have to agree with others here that Lisp is not dead for the simple reason that Emacs is not dead. Emacs has a thriving community of developers who code and use Lisp almost everyday to solve problems.
Org-mode alone has a large number of users from all walks of life, from writers to event organizers and Lisp code is written for Org-mode everyday.
There are high-profile well known companies that use Clojure for processing high volume of transactions. They are in all probability writing Clojure code everyday that is going to production everyday.
What exactly is your definition of "dead"?
P.S. You have also completely misrepresented my earlier comment in your comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33464215 so I am not entirely sure if you are arguing here in good faith or if you have an axe to grind.