So the existence of R is evidence that Lisp's syntax is a serious problem. If a language providing syntactic sugar has a significantly increased adoption rate, that suggests that the bitter pill of your syntax is a problem :-).
Language adoption is a complicated story. Many Lispers won't agree with me anyway. But I do think the poor uptake of Lisp demands an explanation. Its capabilities are strong, so that's not it. Its lack of syntactic sugar is, to me, the obvious primary cause.
R isn't simply syntactic sugar over a Lisp-like runtime, to make it acceptable, but an implementation of an earlier language S, using Lisp techniques under the hood.
So the existence of R is evidence that Lisp's syntax is a serious problem. If a language providing syntactic sugar has a significantly increased adoption rate, that suggests that the bitter pill of your syntax is a problem :-).
Language adoption is a complicated story. Many Lispers won't agree with me anyway. But I do think the poor uptake of Lisp demands an explanation. Its capabilities are strong, so that's not it. Its lack of syntactic sugar is, to me, the obvious primary cause.