Ten years ago Rudolf Winestock wrote The Lisp Curse, an essay that "attempt[ed] to reconcile the power of the Lisp programming language with the inability of the Lisp community to reproduce their pre- AI Winter achievements."
His conclusion? The power and expressiveness of Lisp have conspired to keep its developers individually productive, but collectively unable to organize their work into complete, standardized, well-documented, ‑tested, and ‑maintained packages that they could coalesce into interoperable and widely-adopted solutions. Everything from object systems to types to asynchronous non-blocking programming and concurrency is up for grabs and has multiple competing implementations.