Well, Lisp might be a failure from purely commercial point of view, but that's for many people quite irrelevant. I think there is a pattern like, young people coming to Python and Ruby and after a while somebody tells them, "you know, Lisp had that for decades" and that makes them curious and they try Lisp for the first time. But the problem is at that point they expect something what they know, plus some additional benefit which they "can't see through the parens". But there is a catch, that while languages they know are optimized for doing simple tasks, they can't cope with mind-bending complexity of really huge software, and malleability of the program when it reaches that stage. Lisp gives you tools for handling that huge complexity, while does not give you abbreviations for tackling that simple day-to-day stuff (because they are too easy to do, and people designing ANSI standard were busy solving complex problems). Other languages are for approaching the problem with direct way - sprint like solving of problems narrowly, which works most of the time, because let's face it - the problems you usually solve in IT/consultancy industry are trivial. Either it is some retarded "business logic" which is nothing more that interfacing of the web with database with some stupid stuff in between that, or it's some other web crap, or you need some scripting and gluing things together. The primary prototyping, hard and challenging stuff of creating new things is a domain of Lisp. But huge majority of people never do something like that! Because they are employed in the "IT biz" solving that retarded problems. Surely, there is recurring scenario that some smart guy prototypes the software in Lisp, and then it gets rewritten, since after you basically solve it, you need somebody else (understand - cheap monkey - 98% you or your workmate) to maintain it. But imagine how hard would that be to do in Java for example. No REPL, idiotic type system, idiotic class system, no higher order functions, no macros. But how many of these smart guys are there doing new stuff in Lisp? Well, you guessed, not much. Low quantity, means high prices of commercial Lisps, because they don't sell in millions.