In my experience, to normal people who are simply math students, but without any previous programming experience, C syntax is ugly and Lisp syntax is clean and

In my experience, to normal people who are simply math students, but without any previous programming experience, C syntax is ugly and Lisp syntax is clean and beautiful. Lisp is so much easier for them, that I think that your statements do not take into account familiarity and most people are just being too used to a particular syntax. SICP is a hard book to read, however. There are much easier books to learn Lisp.