Some Lisps were probably passable options in the early 90s, but as the sibling comment says, the lack of documentation and tutorials makes it not all that beginner friendly, along with the dizzying array of what to even choose if you want to use "a" Lisp.
No ML was a realistic workable option back then at all. Haskell is fine now, but was barely introduced in 1993. OCaml has become a workable option almost entirely due to the gargantuan effort of Jane Street, but again, it wasn't then. Standard ML remains terrible. Library support is sparse, there is almost no community outside of academics, no consistent implementation of the standard basis, compilers are wildly different from each other. The REPLs tend to be great, but it's very difficult to get from a set of source files to a portable executable, whereas with Python and Ruby, just writing the source files already gets you that.
That's fair for Lisp, I though having a standard made it better and the main choice was between Common Lisp and Scheme, but from what I see different people use different standards for scheme.
> OCaml has become a workable option almost entirely due to the gargantuan effort of Jane Street, but again, it wasn't then.
What do you mean by this? I'm aware of dune and opam, but people were using C and C++ without equivalents before without problems. Python's package managment and building is also not that good, even today. I don't have a strong grasp of the history of OCaml so maybe they released Core, Base and Async really early compared to batteries and Lwt? But outside of that, basic OCaml with a makefile doesn't sound worse than C/C++.
> Standard ML remains terrible. Library support is sparse, there is almost no community outside of academics, no consistent implementation of the standard basis, compilers are wildly different from each other.
That's fair, my point is more that I don't really understand why no big company ever picked it. Considering how much companies invested in their tooling (Google with Java, Go, Dart, Python, C++ ; Facebook with PHP and C++ ; etc), they could have made something great.
> it's very difficult to get from a set of source files to a portable executable, whereas with Python and Ruby, just writing the source files already gets you that.
Depends on your definition of portable executable. I've always found deploying and distributing Python and Ruby painful, at least to end users. The best in class experience here for me is Go, it's great for end users, great for servers, cross compilation works well.
No ML was a realistic workable option back then at all. Haskell is fine now, but was barely introduced in 1993. OCaml has become a workable option almost entirely due to the gargantuan effort of Jane Street, but again, it wasn't then. Standard ML remains terrible. Library support is sparse, there is almost no community outside of academics, no consistent implementation of the standard basis, compilers are wildly different from each other. The REPLs tend to be great, but it's very difficult to get from a set of source files to a portable executable, whereas with Python and Ruby, just writing the source files already gets you that.