I experienced personal success with it. It's not that Lisp causes people to not be able to work together. The causality runs in the other direction. Lisp tends to attract people who are antisocial by nature, because if they use Lisp they can be vastly more productive as individuals than if they don't. But then you get a community full of antisocial people, and they tend to drive away the team players. So the team players go off and use C/Perl/Ruby/Python/whatever because those communities are full of other team players. As a result, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and the team players win, even though as individuals they may be generally less productive/smart/whatever.
On those rare occasions when Lisp programmers manage to all row together in the same direction they can produce some truly spectacular results (Viaweb, ITA, RAX). But those seem to be the exceptions.
On those rare occasions when Lisp programmers manage to all row together in the same direction they can produce some truly spectacular results (Viaweb, ITA, RAX). But those seem to be the exceptions.