ALGOLites

ALGOL is probably the most influential programming language ever and much to the demise of alternative computing models, most shitflinging gay holy wars fought among people interested in computers are just people arguing which flavor of ALGOL they prefer over another and not actually discussions of different models of how to do computing. The ALGOLites won; the IBM PC, alias the PDP-11, alias the C-machine, alias the ALGOL-machine is the universal standard for almost every current day computer and anybody who doesn't like it has to adjust to the ALGOLites. Although still not as to such an extreme degree, people who say "computer architecture" mean the architecture of the ALGOL machines, the same way they say "computer architecture" to mean Von Neumann architecture. Non-ALGOL ways of computing are so sparse and fringe that most people who program computers probably never heard of FORTH or Lisp – that is to say the average computer scientist or professional software engineer, as with hobbyists you might be luckier – and never came in contact with a machine that wasn't optimized for ALGOL-likes.

There are alternative and fringe hobby OSes such as DuskOS or Mezzano who try to replicate a FORTH or Lisp machine respectively, but they run on computers that weren't meant to run such operating systems and compute in those languages. Embedded FORTH computers or actual Lisp machines were optimized with their respective ways of computing in mind – a FORTH chip might be optmized for handling stacks more effeciently than it is done on x86 (ALGOL-machines) and so can the FORTH take advantage of those optimizations, meanwhile on x86 you have to live with ugly hacks; Likewise, Lisp machines might have GC be part of their hardware and as such take advantage of that instead of relying on the leftovers that were left by the o'so merciful ALGOLites.

There are no Lisp machines available for personal computing and likewise FORTH chips are an obscure curiosity for tinkerers rather than a trillion dollar industry like x86 and ARM. x86 and ARMsare here to stay and will probably live on decades if not centuries just by adding yet another ISA extension, and that much to the disadvantage of alternative models of computing that might offer fresh ideas or actual innovation. I'm aware that FORTH and Lisp are ideas older than x86 or ARM, as such they might be glimpse into an alternative world, but not novel ideas. Which is to say, that even if there was some novel idea worth adopting, nobody will care, and it will fade into obscurity, because ALGOLites won and probably won't be kicked off the throne any time soon.