"an ideal evolutionary path for Lisp that was not being followed"
"much easier to learn"
These are my reasons in a nutshell.
I've always liked the philosophy of programming in whatever language was most suitable to the task, and everywhere I looked indicated that lisps emphasized that philosophy. It made sense, since s-expressions seemed pretty ideal as a way to use a single generic parser to handle all kinds of custom languages.
As I was looking into it, I read about Paul Graham's plans for Arc and liked the idea of a lisp with that kind of open-to-the-programmer philosophy (and avoidance of extraneous parentheses). And then I found out Arc existed, and I gradually made my way over to Arc from Groovy.
Arc doesn't do everything I'd like it to: No modules, less polymorphism than I'd like (but way more than Scheme), not enough consistency for the kind of metaprogramming I have in mind. Still, it's pretty close to what I want, and it's the kind of foundation that's allowed me to get closer and closer.
