Great read.

I think the subtle and common implication that Lisp isn't widely adopted because it's suited to the smart, brave, and experienced, and that the majority of programmers aren't these things, is wrong. Lisp suffers from too much of a good thing, expressiveness, and not enough of a "bad" thing, opinion. The post intends to consider things like this, but still parrots its forefathers by placing Lisp's failure on the supposed weak hands of the market and leverages relativism to avoid concluding that Lisp sucks in substantial ways.

Modern software is collaborative and when everyone has their own preferred way of doing things, none of which is clearly better, composing complex systems from everyone's unique self-expression in code is chaos. Lisp shines when individuals can own entire verticals of a system and are committed to maintaining them, but is impossible to use in a world where programmers are composing code from the work of tens of thousands of people.

Lisp is only the greatest programming language when transaction costs between collaborators are low or nonexistent which is to say, in modern applications at least, it's practically never the greatest programming language.