>>160
OK, I've had some beer and I am feeling charitable towards you.
Yes, but why have they choose to remain wilfully ignorant, this is the question!
No one deliberately chooses to be ignorant. They are willfully ignorant because people have answered their questions:
why is lisp better? Because for example A B C.
But I don't use A or B and I can work around C just fine! Yes but working with these problems means you have all kinds of unmaintainable boilerplate bullshit because your language doesn't allow metaprogramming worth a damn. Etc.
Then time passes, and these people who have been ignoring A and B because it wasn't their problem and working around C because they could find some way are getting a little tired. The workaround is unmaintainable garbage, and A and B were actually more relevant than they realized. Then someone comes up with a fancy new language that has some special forms for handling C, which incidentally now allows workarounds for A and B, and it is the second coming.
So lisp always loses on two fronts to these retards. First it loses because the kind of problems they deal with are small enough to not matter. Then it loses because some new fashionable language close to their own sort of kind of kluges a solution. So it lost when they didn't care, and it loses when someone else handles it anyway.
Software is engineering---and despite your insistence to the contrary, I am an engineer by trade, not a programmer---and in engineering the best solution is almost never chosen. This is because the best solution to an engineering problem is the tiniest bit of a small fraction of a problem that a firm faces. Why did facebook get so popular when livejournal didn't? Who gives a shit? Livejournal is better than facebook, qualitatively, hands down. But fuck it, there's a gazillion non-technical reasons why things fail or succeed and language choice is really, really low on the list.
Then you bring up the old "but what has lisp done besides paul graham." There's so much shit on the internet about lisp success stories it isn't even worth reviewing them. But lisp's success in these venues is likely due to post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies. The kind of people that are attracted to lisp might just be expert fucking hackers in general. They will succeed if they're banging out lisp or working on the Java spec.
Lisps are better languages, hands down. But your metric has almost nothing to do with language quality and if you can't see that, you're more retarded than the programmers I jokingly disparage.