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

[Bengt Richter]

On Sun, 10 Nov 2002 20:00:51 +0100, "Anders J. Munch" <andersjm at inbound.dk> wrote:

>"Jens Axel Søgaard" <usenet at jasoegaard.dk> wrote:
>> >
>> > I'm curious: what exactly did McCarthy's new syntax look like?  Have
>> > you got any pointers to specs, examples or such on the web?
>>
>> I can't remember a link - but if you want to Google for them,
>> they were calles M-expressions.
>
>Tried that, but every professor teaching Lisp/Scheme seems to mention
>M-expressions in passing before proceeding to S-exprs, drowning any
>useful information.
>
>I wonder if M-expressions changed the concrete syntax but preserved
>the abstract syntax? I mean did it preserve the basic
>everything-is-a-cons-or-atom model just adding some infix syntactic
>sugar on top, or was it fundamentally different?
>

Quoting from James Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" (C) 1978 McGraw Hill:
(where *italic* and **bold**)

    "In essence, then, there are *two* LISP's: there is the algorithmic
language and there is the programming language. The programming language
is a data structure representation of the algorithmic language. The algorithmic
language is called the **meta-language** or **M-expr LISP**, and for historical
purposes, the programming language is called **S-expr LISP**."

I have encountered no other book that so clearly focuses attention on
the distinction between abstractions and representations. I suspect a major part
of the attraction of Python is that it lets us program with a goodly set of
clean powerful abstractions, and that that is probably the basis for feelings of
a kind of kinship with lisp, whatever the differences in representation syntax.

Regards,
Bengt Richter