"Out of nowhere"? One of the perennial topics of the mid to late 90s was the idea that Perl needed major fixes to remove common pitfalls (e.g. the object model, syntax warts (nested structures are just horrid), etc) and be more suitable for large projects.
Years passed.
Perl 6 was talked about.
Years passed.
Nothing happened. People gave up and moved on. The same thing's happened to PHP - years of broken things not being fixed eventually causes people to distrust the language's future and prevented it from moving into new niches.
Lisp is more complex, with far more redeeming features, but by now it shares the same failed-promise challenge: I've been writing software for a couple decades, so I missed out on the early history of Lisp, but for most of that time I've kept hearing about how great it is and how it'll soon be as productive as the inferior languages people actually use to get work done - and that point's always been in the future, never the present. Clojure is the only potential exception which I see to that and, to be honest, a large part of that would be due to the Java community's foundation.
Years passed.
Perl 6 was talked about.
Years passed.
Nothing happened. People gave up and moved on. The same thing's happened to PHP - years of broken things not being fixed eventually causes people to distrust the language's future and prevented it from moving into new niches.
Lisp is more complex, with far more redeeming features, but by now it shares the same failed-promise challenge: I've been writing software for a couple decades, so I missed out on the early history of Lisp, but for most of that time I've kept hearing about how great it is and how it'll soon be as productive as the inferior languages people actually use to get work done - and that point's always been in the future, never the present. Clojure is the only potential exception which I see to that and, to be honest, a large part of that would be due to the Java community's foundation.