Lisp has that cool hacker feeling because it's how software development should be done: a relatively minimal core of concepts exploding into endless possibilities, the code you write itself expressed in terms of a runtime data structure which can be traversed and manipulated, the immediacy of a REPL and directly changing a live system.

It never took off because developers are modern Sisyphi, who when freed of their burdens immediately yearn for the feel and heft of the cold stone boulder in their hands. That's how we got Java: enough of Lisp to be tolerable and familiar to C++ programmers.