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It sounds like you're looking for Scheme (well, except for the "less powerful" stuff).

No, scheme and lisp both force newcomers to think in a totally different way: prefix. It's very unnatural for non-programmers and even for seasoned programmers. Balancing all those trees in your head is difficult and taxes the memory. It takes you away from solving the problem and keeps you working the language itself. This is the primary reason the lisps haven't taken over in 50+ years now.

If they're actually newcomers, any way is going to be a totally different way, right?

My 14 y/o daughter is having no trouble with it - in fact she asked why doesn't everyone use S-expressions? Regarding the parentheses, that's simply a non-issue. Both vim and Emacs handle the parentheses so you don't have to worry about it.

Finally, the reason Lisps haven't had much traction over the past 50 years is the Von Neumann computing model proved very useful on anemic hardware and languages such as C were designed to this model. Today's hardware is forcing us to rethink our approach. That's why the Lisps, especially Clojure, have recently gained a lot of traction. You ma want to revisit these languages again.

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