The Genghis Khan Observation:
If a language does not make it to mainstream in nine years, it never
will.
Mainstream in the sense of Fortran and Cobol during the mainframe
years, Pascal and Basic in the PC character mode era, C++ and VB when
GUI became popular, and now Java.
There is now nothing that proponents of Lisp, Eiffel, Smalltalk, to
name a few pretenders, can do to change the (mis)fortunes of their
languages.
A language that is sufficient to solve the general problems of the day
that requires the least amount of mental effort has the potential to
become the mainstream language.
Average is best. (This is in contrast to R P Gabriel's "Worse is
better.")
Nor is there any future event in computing or in the industry that
will spur the resurrection of any of these niche-ly buried languages.
Cheap blinding fast processors and massive storage space, or new and
more powerful and efficient computational algorithms that will solve
existing and new problems will just breed a new language.
Languages are easy to build. Prejudices and mispercentions against
them are near impossible to eradicate.
Lisp will never make it to mainstream...
