Because Common Lisp has been suitable for building complex applications for more than 20 years, while Haskell has been in that state for about 2? It follows that Lisp would have at least an order of magnitude more applications, and that's neglecting "network effects".

Also, Common Lisp still has no libraries or coherent community. Every time I ask #lisp about a library for something trivial, the answer is "write it yourself". This is annoying to people that don't want to shave that particular yak.

Haskell's community is nearly the opposite, so I bet in 18 years we will see many more Haskell apps than Common Lisp apps. Unless the community starts being nice to people, and people start sharing code worth sharing, that is.

The 'Common Lisp has no libraries' thing disqualifies you somehow. I think I have a couple millions lines of Lisp code on my laptop. ITA Software wrote now around 650kloc lines of code for their reservation system, additionally they are using 150kloc of public libraries.

Sure the Common Lisp community is not that 'coherent' - the language is used for very different things. Still there are meetings and conferences where users meet.

The first Haskell report appeared 1990. I'd say there has been lots of time to get applications written. Before Haskell there was Miranda.

Common Lisp has a lot of libraries. Look at CLIKI for some pointers.

So, did you write your Common Lisp library yourself? That's what I usually do when I miss some stuff or would like a different implementation.

Which libraries are these? How much internal tweaking was done to get them to install? Even the best CL libraries I know of (cxml comes to mind) have required lots of hacking (from me) to get them to work on my Linux + SBCL machine. That is the path of least resistance, as far as I know, and it is not very smooth. Even saying nothing about the underlying package repositories, asdf-install is certainly nothing like cpan or cabal-install. Counting the underlying package repositories... well... it's cute that CL tried... (I say this as a big Lisp fanboi, BTW.)

I went to ILC this year. It was nothing like any programming conference I had ever been to. Everyone droned on and on about their incomplete research project or some company they founded that happens to use Lisp. Someone who admitted to never programming in any language other than Lisp told us that it was clear that Lisp was the best programming language. Yeah, you sure convinced me...

Most conferences I go to are about programming techniques or actual working code you can immediately download and use. I think there were about 5 sessions like this at ILC. The rest were largely irrelevant.

The first Haskell report appeared 1990. I'd say there has been lots of time to get applications written.

No, Haskell was junk until about 2 or 3 years ago. Sorry. The runtimes were slow and buggy, there was no community of people writing software, and there were no libraries. There was no packaging system or library database, even. Expecting anyone to write a useful Haskell application would have been completely unreasonable. (But of course, there were some; darcs and ghc for example.)

The same is not true of Lisp. It has been pretty much the same for a very long time.

Look, Common Lisp and Haskell are among my favorite programming languages. But I am not surprised that neither have a wide following, either.

I was at the ECLM a few weeks ago. There was that guy who said he wrote a few million lines of C code himself (he was not the youngest, though). He was presenting a signal processing environment written in Lisp. I found him convincing when he said that he prefers to code in Lisp.

Some days ago I've made a version of Axiom runnable under LispWorks (with a bit of help from the maintainer). Very complex software with a complex build process, ported to several Common Lisp systems. Took me a day to get it to work under LispWorks.