I think S-expressions are fundamentally too difficult to work with, without good editor support, to make Lisp anything other than a niche power tool for the highly motivated. I love CL, Scheme, Clojure, Janet, Fennel, etc. but I don't blame anyone for finding them inaccessible.
I think Python, JavaScript, and Go have caught on for somewhat similar reasons, compared to Java and C#: they are easier to get started with, and you can still scale them up to fairly large applications.
On the other hand, I think S-expressions are a sadly underexplored format for data serialization and storage.
I think Python, JavaScript, and Go have caught on for somewhat similar reasons, compared to Java and C#: they are easier to get started with, and you can still scale them up to fairly large applications.
On the other hand, I think S-expressions are a sadly underexplored format for data serialization and storage.