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

[Courageous]

>(b) what is this about having to do something academically? The group 
>you are involved with uses Lisp, so you have to?

You can't work in the AI community without the occassional shotgun
marriage to Lisp. One of the things that I work on is human workflow
and process modelling. While you _can_ do these things in environments
other than Lisp, you're going to run into very many others in the
community who do use Lisp. This means regular contact.

>(c) You started with coming to like the syntax not being a given. With 
>all the lisp you have done, what bothers you about the syntax.

*shrug*.

Hard to say. I suppose one aspect would be my gut feel that in saving
the parsing load, they created a heavy symbolic load. While you basically
learn to simply filter out all the parentheses, they are there. I prefer
minimalism, which would be one of the reasons I use Python.

> Why do you not like Lisp? 

One example would be the plethora of redundant forms that basically all
do the same thing. Another would be simple pragmatics: try hunting for
3rd party open source Lisp solutions on the web. Hint: ain't many.

One of the things that I like about Lisp is the general utility of the
s-expression itself, as well as the way that macros are given near-first-
class utility in the environment.

C//