To me that reads like gibberish. Common Lisp is used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, why isn't it "as popular as" Java?
Pharo and other Smalltalks are used in ERP and similar systems. It's attractive if your business requirements change a lot and you either don't want or can't afford to employ a legion of Java developers. You could write to https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/ and ask why those logos are at the bottom of that page, now that Smalltalk isn't as popular as it would be if it was any good.
As a CTO I don't really care whether a programming language and toolchain "sells today" or whether it is "competitive" in some general, presumably universal, sense. I want tooling that fits the problem domain really well, and sometimes niche tools outperform general tools by a large margin for certain problems. They might require fewer developers, allow faster development or better scaling than e.g. Java.
Perhaps you could be more charitable in your reading.
> Common Lisp is used in large-scale commercial and industrial applications, why isn't it "as popular as" Java?
Because those large-scale commercial and industrial Smalltalk applications are mid-1990s business-critical legacy systems!
"Over six months in 1996, Smalltalk’s place in the market changed from the enterprise darling COBOL replacement to yet another disappointing tool with a long tail of deployed applications that needed to be maintained.
…
the commercial Smalltalk vendors were unable to counter the Java hype cycle and development of new Smalltalk-based enterprise applications stopped.
"
Pharo and other Smalltalks are used in ERP and similar systems. It's attractive if your business requirements change a lot and you either don't want or can't afford to employ a legion of Java developers. You could write to https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/ and ask why those logos are at the bottom of that page, now that Smalltalk isn't as popular as it would be if it was any good.
As a CTO I don't really care whether a programming language and toolchain "sells today" or whether it is "competitive" in some general, presumably universal, sense. I want tooling that fits the problem domain really well, and sometimes niche tools outperform general tools by a large margin for certain problems. They might require fewer developers, allow faster development or better scaling than e.g. Java.