Well, no, I'm not confusing powerful and popular. I'm asking why, for all lisp's power, there's almost no examples of that power actually doing anyone any good.
Is it because most projects don't need something powerful? The benefits of that power aren't actually that great compared to the rest of the lisp baggage?
We have this trope of the smug lisp weenie and there's definitely a whiff of high wizardry around lisp, but who's actually shipping anything with it?
There's a difference between doing and talking about. Compare an amount of noise from Rust crowd to anything useful being done in Rust.
Let's look at only one product implemented in Lisp, by only one vendor, and it's users in only one industry - http://allegrograph.com/healthcare/. Pfizer, Mayo Clinic, GSK, Novartis - should we stop with that 'doing anyone any good' mantra?
AllegroGraph is a great example. I wrote a book (actually 2 books, with Java and Common Lisp editions) using AllegroGraph. A free PDFs of both editions are available on the book page on my website.
The thing is, I'm trying to ask, if lisp is super-powerful and a secret weapon (the general sense of the claims) why isn't the real world littered with examples of companies who seriously out-competed using Lisp?
So far all people can do is say "no, SOMEONE is using Lisp!"
Well, great, but that's not the claim from the Lisp community.
The claim is that Lisp is powerful, so powerful that it's a secret weapon. Why is there so little evidence of that power being meaningful in actual competition?
The competition you're referring to is an economical one that's based on the product. For any product which is a software application (whatever UI should it sport, native, web based, remotely hosted, etc.), it's commercial success is tied to its features and UX. For something like Amazon or Google, it's not all that important if it's written in Lisp or BCPL or Prolog or whatnot, that's irrelevant in the competition among products.
Lisp's competition is on a technical level with other programming languages, and it's target audience is programmers. It can only help allowing easier development of technology, more fluid continuity from idea to product, robust and helpful debugging tools.
So writing a search engine in Lisp won't necessarily mean that you'll be one step ahead of Google in search business in terms of end product, you still need to come up with a better idea or better UX if you want to compete them, and other factors like advertising, conversion etc are in the play too. But with Lisp you may need less development resources to produce the product than you'd need with C++ or Java.
Well if current BSDs are counted as direct continuations thereof (instead of descendants), maybe it's older. But Emacs directly continues since day one.
Is it because most projects don't need something powerful? The benefits of that power aren't actually that great compared to the rest of the lisp baggage?
We have this trope of the smug lisp weenie and there's definitely a whiff of high wizardry around lisp, but who's actually shipping anything with it?