In Lisp’s quest for industrial respect, it abandoned its traditional customers. Symbolic algebra developers (e.g., Maple, Mathematica) forsook Lisp for the more portable and efficient C. Logicians gave up Lisp for Prolog and ML. Vision researchers, seeking the highest performance from parallel computers, dropped Lisp in favor of C, Fortran (!) and various fringe parallel languages. AI companies were forced to move their expert systems into C, C++, Ada and Cobol (!) because of the large size, poor performance and poor integration of Common Lisp systems. Academicians teaching undergraduates chose Scheme and ML for their small size, portability and clean semantics.

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