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

[Martti Halminen]

Robin Munn wrote:

> I think I was weirded out by Python's indentation like just about
> everyone else who was coming from something like C -- but I quickly grew
> used to it.
> 
> Lisp's parentheses, OTOH, I never got used to. Having to constantly stop
> and count parentheses to remember where I was in my program structure
> quickly went from novel to irritating and never recovered. Most of the
> other students in my CS class agreed with me about the Lots of
> Irritating Superfluous Parentheses.
> 
> The only thing that could make me at all comfortable with using Lisp
> would be if I had an editor that would color-highlight not keywords or
> strings, as color-highlighting usually goes, but levels of parenthesis
> indentation. So that this:
> 
> (a (b (c (d e))))
> 
> would have 'a' in one color, 'b' in a second, 'c' in a third, and 'd e'
> in a fourth.

The secret in programming in Lisp is not to count the parentheses. After
a few months, they pretty much disappear from sight. Counting parens is
for the compiler and editor, the humans read Lisp code based on
indentation (and the editor (emacs, mostly) takes care of that, so the
programmer doesn't have to bother...).
This should be rather easy for Python programmers to understand :-)

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