I don't think this is a fair comparison to what the GP is saying. You can pick up pretty much any book on programming for the C-style and more then 90% of the information will transfer over. Classes may be omitted in some, reqired in others. The same may apply to types. But after they see a compiler warning you're likely to google it and figure out what's wrong very easily.
On the other hand most people, who are quite professional in our field I might add, don't even know the names of the most used LISP derivatives. Many also don't even realize they have one built into their browser that is perfectly adequate for satisfying the desires to explore functional programming and general computation principles.
This isn't a statement of malice or even a bad question from the GP. It is confusing and we only have ourselves to blame for this (ourselves being the world of people who want FP to become more mainstream in the SE world).
Look at the stark differences in these two websites:
- http://racket-lang.org/
- https://www.rust-lang.org/
What we need is this (with much less crap):
- https://www.python.org/
And what we don't need is this (with all of this text and few examples of what you CAN do):
- http://julialang.org/
Granted these are for different markets but the point still stands. If you want adoption by the general software development communities we must make a good case as to why this move should be made. Historically this required a few factors
1. A better alternative to at least 1 problem *
2. A simple unified way of introducing people to the change
3. Simple support for the rollover. Or at least simple enough as to not overpower the benifits presented by switching over.
* = Something that has already been done by the FP community.
You have to understand that peeople call it like they see it and when they see Lots of Insane and Silly Parrens they see LISP and no name change will disaccosiate Scheme, Racket, and LISP in the eyes of the average programmer. I've been using functional languages for a good part of my life as a programmer and I feel they ARE the same. The ideas are common even if their presentation isn't.
The only LISP-Like languages that have sucessfully hid from the tarnished name of LISP are JavaScript and Python and they've managed to develop their own bad raps for themselves in the eyes of some programmers.
No progress will be made by barrating people. Prucussive maintence works on tools and gear, not peers.