It's sad that "language designers" of the languages used today don't know much about language design. They (like Larry Wall and Guido Van Rossum) focus only on syntax, so they come up with dumb, experimental ideas of little importance (like that stupid, stupid tab crap in Python; and all of that conditional stuff in Perl). Moreover, these hacks completely miss "the good stuff" like lexically scoped closures (and not until many version later, likely from Scheme people demanding enough that they put in weak versions).

Python is particularly curious; from the get-go it had "lambda" but it was so horribly weak it was obvious the designer didn't even understand the languages he was so blantantly copying from. (I believe he copied from Ruby, which got closures in the Scheme sense right; which Ruby copied from Smalltalk).

At OOPSLA, the creator of Smalltalk, Alan Kay, said "My language represents an improvement, particularly among its successors". (He was quoting what was originally attributed to the creator of Algol.)

Alas, people like you and I who know better (i.e., know Scheme) are stuck with languages like Perl sometimes or Python/Zope. Meanwhile, the wonderfully designed languages like Dylan have no user base or libraries. I'd probably do a lot more web-programming if Dylan were somehow the language of choice for it.