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

[maney at pobox.com]

Courageous <jkraska at san.rr.com> wrote:
> One of Lisp's _lethal_ failings is that anyone not using Emacs (or
> something like Emacs) is a second class citizen. The decision to
> require a programmer to use a special editor is a fatal one.

But perhaps an unavoidable one.  This discussion has been quite
enlightening to me.  Despite all that I have read over the years,
including at least two serious attempts with what were said to be good
texts for learning Lisp, I have never before seen the true reason
Lisp's annoying parentheses-plagued syntax has persisted, let alone why
it might be worth putting up with.

So now it seems entirely reasonable that it would take a very
language-sensitive editor to make what is basically a representation of
compiler-internal parse trees readable by normal humans; likewise, I
can see why Lisp is so often generated or modified by other Lisp code -
after all, compilers use parse trees as an internal representation
exactly because they are convenient for programmatic transformations.

I'm not sure that knowing this will actually be of much use, should I
attempt to scale Lisp once again, but it might at least help allay the
frustration that has led me to abandon previous attempts.  OTOH, Emacs
is another thing off of which I have repeatedly bounced, so maybe it's
a lost cause.  :-/