>it's syntactical annoyingness is far too much of a barrier to overcome.

You're likely being downvoted because statements like these are more a reflection of you than the language, but instead of phrasing it that way, you come across as making an absolute statement about the language.

In any case, I'll bit.

I'm not a Lisp programmer - the extent to which I do Lisp is the occasional Emacs Lisp. Still:

You can use virtually any character as part of your variable name. Lispers tend to use hyphen and '?' a lot. Once you get used to it, it's hard not to view all other languages as inferior. Why did they restrict the variable names so much?

A lot more substantive: I saw this in John Kitchn's blog post somewhere. My details are probably a bit off, but I think I have the general gist of it. His team works on, I believe, computational chemistry. Their code base is in Python, and they've developed an API for various aspects of their calculation. A lot of their functions require a lot of arguments - not generally a good idea, but it makes sense in the domain they work in. To manage that headache, they've built a systematic way of documenting all those arguments in their docstring, with a particular format.

Unfortunately, that means anyone in his team who creates such a function needs to conform to that format, and people get lazy, make mistakes, etc.

So using Hy, he wrote a macro for another syntax for defining a function. With this new way of defining a function, there was special syntax for all the special information that needs to be in the docstring. The macro then creates the Python function with the appropriately written docstring. If the programmer makes a mistake, the macro fails. So now everyone uses the macro to create those types of functions.

I don't recall the details, but let's say it was something like:

    deff func(x, x_doc="doc for x", y, y_doc="doc for y",...)

If someone makes an argument called x, but does not provide x_doc, then it will fail.

(I think in reality it was more than that - not just x_doc but x_doc_a, x_doc_b, etc and it generated the docstring from all those pieces).

Now are there other, perhaps Pythonic ways to do this? Probably. However, it is nice that for a domain specific problem, you can just invent new syntax and use it.