Ok, if you're sure your argument doesn't apply to high-level languages in general, I'll take your word for it. In that case I'm not following it very well.
I don't think there's any "statistical significance" (using the term loosely) in the failure of Lisp, Smalltalk, or any other language to become a big success. There are too many non-technical and historical factors that can easily explain all these outcomes. Meanwhile the sample sizes are so small—consider how short the list would be of all programming languages that ever had a major turn at bat—that we have no way of drawing true conclusions about this.
For example, it's easy to make a case that Smalltalk lost to Java because (a) the Smalltalk vendors were short-sighted and (b) Java was magically "the internet language" just when the internet was everything new and important. Those are historical accidents that had nothing to do with abstractive power.
A word about the 'antisocial' argument, which I think is deeply wrong about both Lisp and Smalltalk.
It's true that Lisp and Smalltalk let you define "if". That's a measure of their power. But anyone who thinks that Lisp and Smalltalk programmers willy-nilly define "ifs" all over the place (or do anything at that level very often) does not understand the culture of these languages. There are many examples of such willy-nillyness, but that's because it's a phase most programmers seem to go through with this stuff. (I did.) Experience teaches you to be more discerning, and culture, when you're lucky enough to be exposed to it, accelerates experience.
Thus the solution to the misuse of abstractive super-power is culture and community, which work perfectly well in both Lisp's and Smalltalk's case, as their long historical records amply show. A friend of mine was part of the later wave of Smalltalkers in the pre-Java days, and he talks fondly both of how much he learned from the older Smalltalkers (over BBS mostly, since he grew up in a small town) and also how the community as a whole gradually learned to use the power of extending the language well—as well as what to avoid. So it's wrong to attribute some weird anti-social property to these languages. There's even a vibrant counterexample going on right now in Clojure.
I don't think there's any "statistical significance" (using the term loosely) in the failure of Lisp, Smalltalk, or any other language to become a big success. There are too many non-technical and historical factors that can easily explain all these outcomes. Meanwhile the sample sizes are so small—consider how short the list would be of all programming languages that ever had a major turn at bat—that we have no way of drawing true conclusions about this.
For example, it's easy to make a case that Smalltalk lost to Java because (a) the Smalltalk vendors were short-sighted and (b) Java was magically "the internet language" just when the internet was everything new and important. Those are historical accidents that had nothing to do with abstractive power.
A word about the 'antisocial' argument, which I think is deeply wrong about both Lisp and Smalltalk.
It's true that Lisp and Smalltalk let you define "if". That's a measure of their power. But anyone who thinks that Lisp and Smalltalk programmers willy-nilly define "ifs" all over the place (or do anything at that level very often) does not understand the culture of these languages. There are many examples of such willy-nillyness, but that's because it's a phase most programmers seem to go through with this stuff. (I did.) Experience teaches you to be more discerning, and culture, when you're lucky enough to be exposed to it, accelerates experience.
Thus the solution to the misuse of abstractive super-power is culture and community, which work perfectly well in both Lisp's and Smalltalk's case, as their long historical records amply show. A friend of mine was part of the later wave of Smalltalkers in the pre-Java days, and he talks fondly both of how much he learned from the older Smalltalkers (over BBS mostly, since he grew up in a small town) and also how the community as a whole gradually learned to use the power of extending the language well—as well as what to avoid. So it's wrong to attribute some weird anti-social property to these languages. There's even a vibrant counterexample going on right now in Clojure.