It's true that a ton of people do not like all the parentheses. This cannot be understated and it's particularly important to get this point across to lispers.

It's true that a ton of people do not like all the parentheses. This cannot be understated and it's particularly important to get this point across to lispers. It's tough to accept that if you, yourself, can't see any problem at all with them and in fact may well consider them a blessing for delineating pieces of syntax. But most people don't like them. This means you don't have as large of a following. Which means you don't have as many libraries. Which makes new programmers even more likely to choose python over lisp. Additionally python looks more like whatever languages people learn in intro CS classes. This further increases python's following....and its libraries...and it keeps snowballing. And to answer your other questions, yeah, most people don't care about performance and GIL-locked performance is just good enough for what they're doing. Most people these days are gluing things together and essentially doing plumbing (all of it single-threaded), and python is great for that. Machines are fast enough these days that most tasks don't call for multiple cores/threads or even really efficient single-thread performance. It's just the way things are.