A lot of Lisp's current problems could be solved if the entry barrier were simply lowered. Lisp draws the sort of people who are smart enough to get over that hump. They're the same people who think that libraries that don't die horribly so long as you use them right are good enough, that the editing environment and setup procedures that can be figured out with enough Googling is good enough, and a language with a frozen standard but can be changed by the user is good enough. If it's easy for them, it must be easy for everybody else, so why isn't everybody else using it? Lisp programmers, on average, are willing to put up with a lot more, so much as they have the technical superiority in the language itself.
For Lisp to really take off, the community needs to understand that you need more than technical superiority to be a good tool for working with. I totally agree with you.
A lot of Lisp's current
A lot of Lisp's current problems could be solved if the entry barrier were simply lowered. Lisp draws the sort of people who are smart enough to get over that hump. They're the same people who think that libraries that don't die horribly so long as you use them right are good enough, that the editing environment and setup procedures that can be figured out with enough Googling is good enough, and a language with a frozen standard but can be changed by the user is good enough. If it's easy for them, it must be easy for everybody else, so why isn't everybody else using it? Lisp programmers, on average, are willing to put up with a lot more, so much as they have the technical superiority in the language itself.
For Lisp to really take off, the community needs to understand that you need more than technical superiority to be a good tool for working with. I totally agree with you.