A friend of mine was being taught Java in an introductory programming course (although he already knew some BASIC). He was having a lot of trouble, so I introduced him to Lisp... After touring through some of the more basic features (no macro-writing or call/cc), he responded with, "Whoa... This is so much simpler than Java, it makes so much more sense."

My take on that was that the only reason people find Java easier is because it's more similar to other curly-brace languages, the ones they already know. If you take a newcomer to programming, Lisp just may actually be simpler. So the unwashed masses still have some hope.

Anecdotal evidence of teaching Scheme as a first language in a French university shows that it's rather easy to learn, provided that there isn't too much to be unlearned by the audience. Mind you, on 2nd semester they had to learn some Visual Basic and found it gratuitously complicated.

Unwashed masses have accepted to learned very complex frameworks and metaprogramming tools around Java; those stuff are not simpler than, say, Common Lisp. They learned it because the consensus (among their peers) was that these were professional tools, useful for one's career. If a Lisp ever gained that fashionability, it would no doubt be learned very quickly by those "unwashed" masses, even if most of them wouldn't ever reach the guru status.

"Good luck teaching the unwashed masses lisp."

What problems did you have learning Lisp?

I know its a cliche, and not really a "programming language" but XML has caught on with the masses (yes, its still popular, although I would wager most here would hate to edit it by hand).

Who knows what the future holds. Good luck indeed !

Careful. The year of the Lisp is not far off.