Well hopefully they realize it won't take over the world and they are okay with that.
The minute you start doing actual work for paying clients is the minute that compromises sneak in. Certainly the last thing these people would want is for the LISP community to become like the PHP community where the few nuggets of good code are drowned out by flood of sewage. Maybe someone thinks you couldn't write code that bad in a pure LISP, but believe me you would see some pretty horrendous crap if LISP had 10% marketshare of, let's say, web programming.
Frankly, this fear just sounds too much like "Oh no, I'd hate to see anything tinge my precious baby!"
What's wrong with there being poorly written code in your favorite language? Unless these Lispers also do web development, they likely won't come in contact with the hypothetical bad Lisp-on-web code. So why should they care? Also, how is the good code drowned out? Assuming that the screening process for a job picks out good PHP developers, it isn't that hard for one to find good PHP code in the form of frameworks and libraries.
Well sure, to normal people yes. But to understand the mentality, just consider for a second that the OA is foaming at the mouth of a language that is merely inspired by LISP.
wrt the PHP thing, well, I cut my teeth on PHP, and frankly I didn't learn much by reading code I found early on. After doing it for a couple years (and completing an MIT-based CS degree) I started to discover the flaws for myself and I was eventually well-trained enough to be able to find the good code. If you know what to look for it's easy. However what's popular in PHP world (ie. what you find on Google) is not necessarily good. Compared to Ruby or Python, or hell, even Perl, it's just way harder to find good PHP code to learn from for a beginner.
