Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

[Terry Reedy]

<Pythoneer delurking.  Preface: reading this thread (and two ot the
references) has increased my appreciation for Lisp.  However...>

"Kenny Tilton" <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> wrote in message
news:3DEADC6F.8090204 at nyc.rr.com...
> No. Anders suggests that Lisp in effect selects for programmers who
can
> deal with parens. I am saying no one who spends enough time doing
Lisp
> (three weeks?) even notices them anymore. They are no more
bothersome
> than the spaces between words.

After 15 years of C, I still thought the (visually) redundant braces
bothersome.
Its a lifelong personality quirk that I detest unnecessary busy work -
and I consider(ed) visual structure (indenting) necessary, making the
braces annoying.

> As someone else said, Lispers are eyeballing the (automatically
provided!) indentation.

Precisely!  So why bother displaying the visually unneeded and, to me,
distracting parentheses?  (This is separate from whether they should
be kept in the file to keep code and data syntactically equivalent.)

I think we all understand that fences and \n<indent> are alternative
ways of conveying block-structure information.  If one regards program
text as a linear stream of characters, it is inviting to regard the
latter as useless whitespace, present only for the benefit of humans,
and toss them when compiling.  To me, part of the genius of Python was
to turn the equation around, dump the fences, and rewrite the parser
to instead pay attention to what was previously tossed.

> I should think Pythoners would appreciate that. :)

Yes, I do.  One thing I have learned from this thread is that a
Pythonic Lisp editor could remove (at least visually) many block
structure parens and make Lisp code look much more like Python.
Knowing this will help me read Lisp code slightly easier.

Terry J. Reedy