Why don't people like lisp?

[prunesquallor at comcast.net]

danbmil99 at yahoo.com (dan) writes:

> Google ate my long post, so I'll make it simple.
>
> Lisp failed (yes, it did) because of the parentheses.  Normal people
> can't parse 13 close-parens easily.  Functional notation is
> non-intuitive and hard to read.

Damn, but I wish we'd noticed that!  It would have saved us such
trouble.  Who'd have thought that it was something as simple as
parenthesis?

I'm really surprised that McCarthy didn't realize this and invent some
sort of meta-language for lisp that resembled FORTRAN.  Why didn't
someone with expertise in the translation of English into logical
expressions, like Vaughn Pratt for example, *do* something about this?

Perhaps we should have used curly braces?

> The world is moving in the direction of languages like Python, that
> fit naturally with how we speak and write.

That is to say:

    world.MovingDirection = fit(we.speak() and \
                                we.write, fitfunctions.Naturally))