There's also the not all small factor that there was glam to Lisp.
Early Internet discourse around programming was dominated by people who had ties to elite universities in the 1980s, who yearned for the times when the US Government was throwing an abundance of money to the AI industry of the time.
They were the ones rubbing elbows with researchers from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley, who were using specialized hardware and software beyond the capabilities available to that of developers working on more mundane applications, all graciously funded by DARPA initiatives.
That experience was, in truth, unrelatable to young people reading the recollections of ESR and RMS of the period, the in-jokes of these people, their ideas and interactions, but the tales of Lisp, the Lisp hackers and their fabled Lisp machines would be extremely appealing to someone who was very passionate about programming, striving for excellence as a programmer, and to advance in life through merit. Paul Graham would seal the deal with his essays.
Early Internet discourse around programming was dominated by people who had ties to elite universities in the 1980s, who yearned for the times when the US Government was throwing an abundance of money to the AI industry of the time.
They were the ones rubbing elbows with researchers from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley, who were using specialized hardware and software beyond the capabilities available to that of developers working on more mundane applications, all graciously funded by DARPA initiatives.
That experience was, in truth, unrelatable to young people reading the recollections of ESR and RMS of the period, the in-jokes of these people, their ideas and interactions, but the tales of Lisp, the Lisp hackers and their fabled Lisp machines would be extremely appealing to someone who was very passionate about programming, striving for excellence as a programmer, and to advance in life through merit. Paul Graham would seal the deal with his essays.