I'm not too sure, but Python has always had great integration with C. It also follows the familiar statement based, imperative procedural model pretty closely. And it has been bundled on unix-like systems for the last 25 years. In that sense, its tottally riding the same wave, leveraging the momentum behind those languages.
That's the crux of my argument. Not that Lisp is too slow today, it's quite fast considering today's programming language landscape. But that it was when it mattered, in the 70s and 80s.
Had Lisp been able to overcome that, we might be in a world where the most popular OS is implemented in Lisp with a Lisp API. Where the commonly thought paradigms in school would be expression based lambda calculus, functional programming, dynamic runtime object systems, meta-programming and the all mighty parenthesis syntax ;)
That's the crux of my argument. Not that Lisp is too slow today, it's quite fast considering today's programming language landscape. But that it was when it mattered, in the 70s and 80s.
Had Lisp been able to overcome that, we might be in a world where the most popular OS is implemented in Lisp with a Lisp API. Where the commonly thought paradigms in school would be expression based lambda calculus, functional programming, dynamic runtime object systems, meta-programming and the all mighty parenthesis syntax ;)