Is Lisp the mystic on the mountaintop?

A few weeks ago I wrote about what seems missing in modern programming languages. This past week, I went on a job interview at another Cambridge software and....they program in Lisp!

Is what's old new again? Is Lispthe language to which 10 years from now the industry will return, after all the flirtations with alternatives? I've heard a paraphrasing of Philip Greenspun's famous adage, which in my version was "Every programming language of the last 40 years has been reinventing what Lispalready did." Could it be that there is little point to trying to build the missing language--because it's not missing at all, just abandoned?

And after all these years of scientists questing for the better way to write programs--will we find LISP quietly sitting at the top of the mountain we've been climbing?