I will answer your question through its dual : the people who love LISP and functional programming are in my experience people who love maths - as in, algebra, etc. . You can easily recognize them, because they say weird things such as "this demonstration is so elegant !".

Functional programming of course maps (heh) very cleanly to this line of thought.

But most people hate maths and this way of thinking. In contrast, you get first year students "re-discovering" OOP ever year - for instance a common trick to make them learn design patterns is just to put a problem that calls for it in front of them, and three times out of four in my experience they will even come up with a pattern name close to the original ones.

Thank you.

One thing that comes to mind is that looping is limited to recursion in scheme. This becomes quite coumbersome IMO since it is a pretty important thing. Writing named lets for simple things is not anyone's preferred way.

It is however pretty easy to implement something like racket's for loops on scheme using lower level macros, and there are some available.

Implementing something like common lisps iter is actually not very hard, and even improving upon racket's for loops is far from complex.

> looping is limited to recursion in scheme

I believe that Scheme's DO is looping.

Which is still painful to use compared to python's for loops or comprehensions