You will see it defended a lot on Hacker News, due to the disproportionate level of PL enthusiasts, and the Paul Graham thing. But yes, you're right that in reality, lisps have incredibly limited popularity. (You've met one more full-time Lisper than me and I've been in the industry for 10 years).
In my current and in my last 2 jobs I've been using a Lisp (Clojure). Since learning Clojure and functional programming in general, I made a conscious choice to seek it out for the last two positions (a small startup and a huge government project) and in this current one (university research) I'm starting two projects from scratch and get to decide myself which language to use, so of course I'm gonna choose the one I enjoy the most and will be more productive in. It's hard to go back to imperative/oop.
What for? I mean, I have relative freedom at work and could probably use Lisp on my own tools for my own job, but I’ve never really considered it (I use Haskell and Python instead).
