Apollia <apollia112@???> writes:

[...]

> Emacs recently reawakened my curiosity about Lisp, which was originally
> piqued years ago by Paul Graham's articles on Lisp:
>
> http://www.paulgraham.com/lisp.html
>
> I never got far with Lisp all those years ago. But, recently, I found
> working with Emacs Lisp a lot more enjoyable and productive than I thought
> I might, and in some ways Emacs Lisp is actually more comfortable to use
> and easier for me to understand than Perl and Bash.
>
> And I've encountered so much high praise of Lisp that I'm now extremely
> curious to know if it really is as superior to other programming languages
> as it's reputed to be. And if it is, why isn't Lisp more popular?

Somewhat educated guess at that:

When John McCarthy initially designed the language, S-expression (the
stuff in brackets) where supposed to be for use by the machine while a
to-be-created later M-expression syntax was supposed to offer a more
familiar 'algebraic syntax' to humans. But S-expression syntax turned
out to be so popular that the M-expression project was
dropped. Unfortunately, this means that Lisp categorially doesn't
resemble algebraic expressions in any way, and people tend to reject
'unfamiliar stuff' out of hand because it's unfamiliar, especially when
they've invested a sizable amount of effort into learning
(now) familiar stuff.

One of the longest running language wars in history was caused by the
fact that "some American guy" (Dennis Ritchie) ignored the Algol
convention of using := to express assignment in favour of just using
=. This would seem a preposterous cause for a 40-years-and-counting
propaganda campaign/ flame war but at least until last year, the guy who
Strongly(!!1) objected to that was still happily publishing new texts
about this atrocious case of deviant behaviour.