You're using Lisp software right now!

I think this is the most treacherous assumption people tend to make about programming languages, for a few reasons. One of them is that we really don't have any way to measure software that we actually use day to day.

Think about the software controlling your local water treatment plant, traffic lights, the software your local power company relies on, the software running the servers you connect to, and all the servers those things connect to. All the infrastructure in between and the infrastructure's own infrastructure. Allegro Lisp's customers are shotgun spread in industries like healthcare, finance and manufacturing. They're paying for it, so we can infer they're using it, but can anybody actually name what software is written in it?

If we play six degrees of separation, accounting for the full gamut of every single computer that does something relevant to your life no matter how distant, how much of that software are you actually familiar with? The fact of the matter is that we genuinely have no broad picture. There is no introspective method to find out what software you are relying on in your day to day life, almost all of it is completely opaque and implicit. To ask "what software do I use?" is to ask an unanswerable question. So to then synthesize an answer is to work with an unsound, unsupported, incomplete conclusion, which is exactly how you end up assuming you don't use software written in Lisp, while directly using software written in Lisp (HN)

Of course, even accounting for the epistemic issue, the premise is still flawed. ATS is a language with 'useful ideas, but...', Haskell is an aging pragmatic kitchen sink. Positioning the latter as the former is almost comedic.