This is indeed part of what I meant to see before in this thread; it is very hard to convince people, who are kind of biased already by the syntax and the 'old age' of the language, to just try it out for a while. It's the same issue with Lisp/Scheme; if you do wrestle through Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction and/or SICP, you'll see things in a different light, probably forever and for the better. But it takes (a lot of) effort and if you are biased against something from the start, that's not going to stimulate you much.
