Is this a troll?

It's not. Although I'll be the first to admit that it comes off as trollish. It's just I see these pronouncements about a language, which frankly, I don't think can be backed up. I like Lisp as a language. I really do. But to me that's not sufficient to annoint it a super language.

The evidence of its superiority is lacking. The one thing that languages generate is work product, programs/libraries/etc...

In contrast, look at something like VB. An oft-scorned language, but a language that you can walk into any Fortune 500 company and can probably find 10M LOC across the enterprise used for business critical purposes. And further, the interesting thing about VB is that you probably couldn't have replaced the language with any other language and had the same productivity.

Now of course this last assertion is hard to prove. But at least we have existence. At least we can say, "if there was a better solution than VB, no one used it". And it was rediscovered by every enterprise in the world.

Again, I'm not saying Lisp is a bad language. But to the best of my ability it seems to be about on par with other modern languages (and that in itself might be compliment enough for some, given its vintage). I see a couple of truly noteworthy Lisp projects, a lot of middling ones, and that's it. About what I'd expect for a language with a user base of its size.

Over the past 40 years there hasn't been any mind-blowing Lisp projects. And there's nothing wrong with that, I wouldn't necessarily expect it, except that its supposed to be a super language. Not only a super language, but a language practiced by the brightest amongst us. And by accounts of some evangelists, a toolchain that is magnitudes better than that available for other languages.

Yet as a result I typically get 3 projects noted to me when we talk about notable Lisp projects. Emacs, ViaWeb, and ITA. Three great projects. But if someone said that they were written in C and not Lisp, everyone would believe it. And when people go back and talk about important/influential software in history, Emacs is likely the only one to be mentioned. And of course there's been tons of other very important SW that has been written in languages other than Lisp, from Tex, to Mosaic, to Lotus 123, to gcc, to iOS, to Google, and so on.

The worse is better, Lisp super-loner, rationalization seems like a pity party. And what makes it sad is that it's simply not necessary. There's no shame in liking a language for characteristics you find appealing. But don't try to sell it as some super language. Because when you do people will say that the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. And the tasting are the programs. If you want to show that Lisp can do what others only dream of, show us the programs that make us drop our jaws. Show us the programs that make us rush to relearn Common Lisp. RoR didn't catch on because it had a sexy name. It caught on because the pudding was pretty tasty -- although a bit cloying for my taste.

Moreover, in no field of creative human endeavor have popularity and worthiness been correlated. You think all those billboard top 10 acts came from Juliard?

Are you arguing that for music that college serves little purpose? That we're entering some type of music education bubble. :-)