Lisp disappointed a lot of people in the early 2000s. It wasn't ready for a close-up examination by people who cut their teeth on Perl, Python, and Java. All the little inconveniences, the lack of software repos, the lack of organized open-source projects, the attitude that people shouldn't expect to get work done right away, the "why do you need a library for X when you can write it in twenty lines of code?" The Lisp community was pretty satisfied with the way it did things (which I think was more a reasonable attitude than it appeared from the outside) but they were not prepared to explain themselves to a mob of curious people with entirely different expectations for a programming language community.

Erasing that initial bad impression may be a generational thing. Even heroin goes through cycles where a new generation comes along that hasn't seen anyone die of heroin, they make heroin cool for a while, and then the horrifying results inoculate the culture against the idea that heroin is cool for another fifteen or twenty years. Lisp will get another chance, and it can afford to wait.

Also, I think next time around it won't be Lisp, the universal solution. It will be a Lisp. It might not even be called Lisp. It might be called "Clojure" or something odd like that ;-)

Can't get a hold on a blog article from an old lisper expressing his lack of understanding about the so-called lisp library problem. It was a clear summary of the fallacy.

What's your take on it ?

More and more I hear people 'they've been doing this in lisp all along' so I make a naive guess that in the future lisp genes will reappear in more favorable settings and won't get dismissed as they were before. It's already happening as for gc's and closure right ?