> If S-expressions were easier to edit, it would be most logical to edit the document in S-expressions and then write a small Scheme program to convert S-expressions into a formatting language like LaTeX. This is, what XML and SGML people have done for decades [...]
(1) As another comment points out, they have when doing so provided benefits. (2) Lispers tend to be multi-lingual; they'll use other languages when appropriate. If XMLers can only work in XML....
>This is, what XML and SGML people have done for decades
Decades? 20 years/two decades ago is 1988. The first draft of XML is roughly 1998/10 years later/one decade ago. GML, a predecessor to SGML, didn't become public until 73 but the "multiple use" stuff was still in the future.
SGML rode the WWW wave, but that didn't happen for technical reasons.
Note that the point of using s-expressions as a front-end would be programmatic generation, not by-human editing. (Neither sexpressions nor xml is actually all that friendly for editing text.)
Do XML folks really think write front-ends for ease of editing?
How does he know they didn't?