Lisp absolutely took off and had a heyday.

We are decades past "peak Lisp".

Lisp grew in capability and complexity at a voracious pace and required expensive, powerful hardware, always at the edge of the hardware envelope.

Then microcomputers happened, featuring the power and speed of big iron machines from 15-20 years prior.

Almost no software survived the transition from big iron to microcomputers. Pretty much no operating system, and few programming languages or applications---everything was "rebooted". Microcomputers went through their own cultural evolution, with entirely new software.

Customers were buying microcomputers, including lots of new customers that didn't have computers before, and you couldn't sell them software that wouldn't run (or fit) onto those.

Simple as that; nothing to do with macros.

(Unix jumped to microcomputers because it was a lean, resource-efficient minicomputer operating system; the lag between micros becoming as powerful as minis was not as great (decade or so) and basically dove tailed with the Unix timeline. Unix was ready just as micros were becoming ready.)

If it was about macros, we wouldn't be talking about Lisp; it would be entirely dead. HackerNews would be in written in Paul Graham's small dialect of PL/I or something, which would still be here due to not confusing anyone with macros.

You're not the only one, "The Lisp Curse"[1] essentially says the same thing (but spends a lot more time praising/criticizing the "lisp hacker").

> The expressive power of Lisp has drawbacks. There is no such thing as a free lunch. > - The Lisp Curse

[1]: http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

I think this is a tooling problem, as far as LISPs go, because unlike C, you (as far as I remember, perhaps I'm wrong) aren't relying on the compiler to fill in the bits, the macro is just a shortcut, if you will, to functionality.

Not always transparent, but it should be solved with correct tooling. I think the bigger problem was LISP was far too long tied to LISP Machines, rather than being able to run independently on any hardware, which helped C and Pascal gain traction early

Programmers are not Computer Scientists, and the world is poorer for their conceit.

People keep saying this (especially here, lately) but it's a nonsense strawman argument. People can do stupid and sufficiently unreadable things in any language. Further, at sufficient scale - a large, long lived proprietary codebase - it hardly matters, it becomes the local dialect.