> It fails to attract many people because it's not a fun language to get started in.

Interesting. Nobody is born knowing any computer language. Languages therefore are popular (among other things) in proportion to their ability to convert "those who don't know the language" into "those who know", and "those who know" into actual users. A gentle introduction to those who don't know anything is therefore a good start. I suspect that both Lisp and Haskell suffer from this.