> If you invoke the collapse of commercial AI to explain Lisp's current state of disfavor, you then have to explain why the collapse of the dotcom bubble didn't have a similar effect on Perl or Java.
I'm not saying AI Winter is the definitive explanation, but AI collapsed so thoroughly that there were barely any AI companies still around. Even at the worst of the dotcom collapse, use of the web was still growing among the general populace, and the principle leaders like Yahoo, Amazon, and Ebay are still around.
Your argument about Lisp losing interest because of the PC boom is really interesting, and I think it has some merit. Still, doesn't it beg the question of why people didn't just port Lisp to the PC and keep going? That's what happened with Unix -> Linux.
I'm not saying AI Winter is the definitive explanation, but AI collapsed so thoroughly that there were barely any AI companies still around. Even at the worst of the dotcom collapse, use of the web was still growing among the general populace, and the principle leaders like Yahoo, Amazon, and Ebay are still around.
Your argument about Lisp losing interest because of the PC boom is really interesting, and I think it has some merit. Still, doesn't it beg the question of why people didn't just port Lisp to the PC and keep going? That's what happened with Unix -> Linux.