Trust us, Lisp was hyped (I worked for "the other Lisp Machine company" in the early '80s). Albeit perhaps not as much as Ada.
One big thing to consider about the normal Lisp and Smalltalk implementation style vs. C and Clojure by virtue of it running on top of the JVM (and CLR, and for the Javascript version I hope it inherited a lot of this) is that the former are "take over the world" approaches, back in those days and still a lot today (e.g. SBCL) implemented by dumping an image to memory and restoring that when you want to run it.
Whereas C is very much a building blocks approach, and within the JVM Clojure is as well. E.g. for the latter the popular Leiningen tool uses directives like
And known repositories to pick up the corresponding .jar files. Java and any other language that fits into the JVM ecosystem is an equal player on the JVM with Clojure, and it defers to Java for things the latter already does quite well enough.
This sort of approach, which in the case of Java and Clojure is NOT Worse is Better/The New Jersey Way, seems to have survival characteristics.
Hard to determine how much this was a factor vs. performance, C being a general purpose portable assembler. After UNIX(TM) and C grew up on tiny machines, we then largely squeezed into barely larger ones, the 8086 and 68000 based ones when DRAM was still pretty dear. Or for "engineering workstations", I'm told a non-common, although not all that good configuration early on was one Sun with a hard drive and 2-3 diskless ones all sharing the drive.
One big thing to consider about the normal Lisp and Smalltalk implementation style vs. C and Clojure by virtue of it running on top of the JVM (and CLR, and for the Javascript version I hope it inherited a lot of this) is that the former are "take over the world" approaches, back in those days and still a lot today (e.g. SBCL) implemented by dumping an image to memory and restoring that when you want to run it.
Whereas C is very much a building blocks approach, and within the JVM Clojure is as well. E.g. for the latter the popular Leiningen tool uses directives like
And known repositories to pick up the corresponding .jar files. Java and any other language that fits into the JVM ecosystem is an equal player on the JVM with Clojure, and it defers to Java for things the latter already does quite well enough.This sort of approach, which in the case of Java and Clojure is NOT Worse is Better/The New Jersey Way, seems to have survival characteristics.
Hard to determine how much this was a factor vs. performance, C being a general purpose portable assembler. After UNIX(TM) and C grew up on tiny machines, we then largely squeezed into barely larger ones, the 8086 and 68000 based ones when DRAM was still pretty dear. Or for "engineering workstations", I'm told a non-common, although not all that good configuration early on was one Sun with a hard drive and 2-3 diskless ones all sharing the drive.