Lisp still might be popular if the Usenet group got banned back in the day. Lisp developers were famously incredibly rude for some reason and if you asked a question a guy named Erik Naggum would write essays screaming at you and tell you to kill yourself, then everyone else would call him "a character". I sort of think this is why people stopped using the language.

Eventually they calmed down and now everyone seem to be genuinely nice. I personally just had to live through a later period, where they didn't scream at you, but instead just constantly implied they were smarter than you in every way because you wrote in "Blub" or "Javascript".

I still remember when he compared Scheme to The Bell Curve

"well, enough marketing for Scheme. once you try it, you'll understand. be warned that lots of people approach Scheme the same way they approach controversial books (The Bell Curve comes to mind): they don't read it, they don't know any of the things it actually says, but they have a hell of a lot of opinions about it."

Good thing the precedent here is that they were reinstated.

> https://support.google.com/groups/thread/61391913

"This question is locked and replying has been disabled."

Gee, lovely.