>>8
I'll take CL as an example and prove that it doesn't fit
>>9's definition:
1. Poor library support.
No, there's plenty of libraries - I've yet to encounter needing a general purpose library which I couldn't find. In recent CL applications I've written, I've used 4-5 libraries per project. Minor bugs were encountered on some older ones, but fixing the bugs myself only took >30min of debugging time total.
2. Obstacles that prevent real world usage e.g.
- Buggy/immature implementation
Some implementations have 10-20 years(or more) of development behind them. Most are pretty damn stable and mature.
- Poor performance, especially for critical things like I/O
Almost all real ones generate native code. Some can approach C in levels of performance if used with enough declarations. 2-4 times slower than C is common when one doesn't optimize/profile, but that's still much better than some other languages.
- Difficult to program in
3. Little adoption by for-profit or notable non-profit organizations
What does adoption have to do with difficulty of programming in? It was adopted in the past by the US govt and various corporations (Symbolics even made an entire OS in it), but due to mismanagement and the AI Winter, usage drops. It's still in use by various companies, some quite large, but it's most certainly not a mainstream language.
4. Unorthodox language features.
What does ``unorthodox language feature'' even mean? Do you consider the C pointer unorthodox? Do you consider the Java class unorthodox? Do you consider direct memory access in assembler unorthodox? Do you consider passing functions as arguments (first-class functions) in a language unorthodox? Do you consider VHDL/Verilog's timing model unorthodox? and so on.
Language features are what define a language. There's no such thing as orthodox or unorthodox, unless you mean that anything that isn't just a strictly imperative language as unorthodox, but even if you consider that, most languages, even popular ones, don't fit that model exactly. Lisp's features usually take advantage of the S Expression based notation to achieve macros, read/write representations, first-class functions, list templates and so on - they are what define the language.
5. Cult-like user base
A bit confused what this is supposed to mean. I'm willing to go for what
>>10 said, but I'd imagine anyone has some favorite language (be it C, Java, Perl, PHP, Haskell, Scheme, CL, etc), so it probably applies to any language. Lisp does have a few separate userbases which keep it alive by maintaining implementations and writing libraries (most BSD/MIT, public domain, and a few LLGPL(more permissive LGPL)).