[zahlman]

I would argue that nowadays the libraries and frameworks are more to blame than the languages. We aren't creating the right elegant DSLs. But more importantly we're still expecting people to inherit from library classes — perhaps multiple levels deep — to swap functionality in and out. We could just use functions as first-class objects but instead we have to understand this unnatural intermingling of code and data that's based on "modeling" a supposed concept in the problem domain (rather than the solution domain) that barely makes any sense in and of itself. Like Rich Hickey explained (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4), things become complex because you complect them.

You can get a lot of APL / LISP feeling out of carefully written Python or JavaScript. Not the metaprogramming stuff, sure. But a lot of that in LISP depends on homoiconicity, which is one of the biggest things making the language "not usable by average developers".