Commenting on the last paragraph: I honestly believe that one of the biggest obstacles for newcomers to Lisp is Emacs.<p>Don't get me wrong, I love Emacs and it is truly the superior environment to do work in Lisp. However it has a bit of a steep learning curve just like Lisp itself and fighting two battles (one with Lisp and one with Emacs) is no easy task for someone coming from a Java / C# and Eclipse / Visual Studio background. I know because I've been there. That's why I decided to start work on an open source Visual Studio add-in to support for Common Lisp in Visual Studio itself. I think being able to do the first steps in a familiar environment would be a great help for newcomers. I wonder what you guys think of the idea?
> After all, I was almost blinded by the infamous Lisp parentheses!<p>Lisp's parenthesis seem to share their deterrence factor with Python's significant indentation. Most people who have used one of them for a while don't even notice them any longer. At least not as a problem.<p>Interestingly, Haskell seems to be strange enough, that nobody fears its significant indentation.