[jamesjporter]

I agree with collyw; Lisp is too much for most scientists, who just care about getting their research done and can't be bother to learn all this weird FP/paren stuff [1]. Supplying an obvious, familiar syntax that looks like math written on paper for, e.g., matrix operations, is critical. This is actually one of the core tensions in Julia development imho: balancing having a sane, well designed language (from a programmer's perspective) vs. having a tool that allows scientists to quickly and easily crank out results.

[1]: Note; I am not insinuating that Lisp is bad, I like it personally. Just relaying the response you will get from most practicing scientists who are not trained as programmers.

[michaelochurch]

Just relaying the response you will get from most practicing scientists who are not trained as programmers.

Is it that hard of a gap to cross? I was a math major who took a couple CS courses, and wouldn't say I was "trained as a programmer". I found Scheme pretty easy to get from the go.

I tend to think that anyone who can get a PhD in the physical sciences can become a half-decent programmer-- if the desire is there, the intelligence and work ethic being established (one hopes, at least) by the degree.

[jamesjporter]

It's less a matter of ability and more a matter of having the time/motivation. If you took a bunch of practicing natural scientists and/or engineers and forced them somehow to enroll in a course teaching Scheme/Clojure/etc., would many of them do well? Almost certainly. If you gave them the choice between a Lisp and something like Julia or MATLAB to use in their everyday work when they need to do some computation? They'll probably choose the later because it's easy and familiar and doesn't have a huge up-front time investment; scientists tend to be very busy people.