I don't mean that everyone is that obsessed; suffice it to say that enough people have the mentality that they want their entire environment to be in Lisp/Scheme/Smalltalk (the last of which is pretty much that way by design) to have created a culture that is, on average, more concerned with that kind of thing than the scripting languages were - they were too busy getting things done, piggybacking on Unix, C, and Windows to some degree. Note that the Java people have also gone in big for 'turtles all the way down', but that's easier with millions of Sun dollars at your back.
My point wasn't that Scheme/Lisp/etc... are impractical languages, or unusable for real work, but more along the lines of "ok, these are great languages, languages that have changed the way everyone thought - so why aren't they more popular? What went wrong?"
One very specific example - I recall fooling around with Scheme a while ago, and the implementation I was using didn't even have a string-split (string -> list). Easy to implement? Sure, but also evidence that it wasn't being used for the sort of practical things I wanted to do with it.
If you feel to taste Scheme again, check out mine http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/ . It has string-split :) Seriously, it aims at being a handy tool for day-to-day scripting.
My point wasn't that Scheme/Lisp/etc... are impractical languages, or unusable for real work, but more along the lines of "ok, these are great languages, languages that have changed the way everyone thought - so why aren't they more popular? What went wrong?"
One very specific example - I recall fooling around with Scheme a while ago, and the implementation I was using didn't even have a string-split (string -> list). Easy to implement? Sure, but also evidence that it wasn't being used for the sort of practical things I wanted to do with it.