[brlewis]

Having heard "Lisp would be popular only if X were true" many times over the years, I've developed a quick test for such statements. I take a quick mental tour through languages that have become popular, and stop when I arrive at an example where X is false. If I ever get to the end of my list and X has been true for all of them, I might actually believe the statement.

Left as an exercise for the reader: Are there any languages that have become popular despite not having discipline built into the language? If so, then it's not a prerequisite for popularity.

[palish]

I'm referring to languages that weren't primarily pushed by big companies to make them popular. For example, Ruby.

[brlewis]

Would you describe PHP as having discipline built in? I notice for your CL example of lack of discipline you chose a namespace issue.

[palish]

It may be true that it only became popular because it was more disciplined than Perl, at least when it came to expressing websites.