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

Courageous jkraska at san.rr.com
Sun Dec 1 14:12:50 EST 2002 
>Most people who tried Lisp didn't like it BECAUSE of the parens.  

A fairly heavy syntactic-symbolic load to drive away the parsing load,
yes.

Here's a source of annoyance: 

	(something
		(something
			(something)))

When editing this code, if you want to conduct a line-append operation
in vim, you have a couple of choices. You either go to the _beginning_
paren of the form you want to append after, hit the % key, hit a, hit
return, then tab, and start typing, or you manually count parens at the
tail, and hit a, hit return, tab, and then start typing. Either way,
this is a big annoyance.

Of course, you can opt out of this annoyance by using a Lisp-aware editor.
That, however, is a further annoyance. Languages which _require_ special
editors are essentially dead in the marketplace. Programmers are a finicky
lot, and one way to get a lot of them annoyed with you is to tell them
they can't use their favorite editor.

let-me-use-my-own-fucking-editor-or-i-will-kill-you-ly yrs

C//
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