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But why can't we have nice things back?

Like that discussion a while back about early competitors to CSS like DSSSL. Imagine if, instead of CSS/Javascript, we'd just had Scheme. In fact, imagine if instead of HTML/CSS/Javascript... we just had Scheme.

This particular example breaks my heart, because AFAIK[0] JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme at least two times during its development.

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[0] - read that in the interviews in "Coders at Work".

Scheme: ever the bridesmaid never the bride?

Other than the source code looking nice to people who prefer to see s-expressions everywhere, how would that have improved the web?

Particularly at the beginning, when the web was intended to be nothing but markup and hyperlinks for otherwise plain text documents?

Because contrary to common belief, in capitalism it's not the best solution that wins, but the meanest shark.

That I know. But forgetting the hardware for a bit, at least software (in particular open source) is still (fortunately) a quite economically inefficient space. Yet there isn't much work going on in bringing the good solutions from the old days back.

I think it's not a matter of open source : there's no mean shark behind LISP but there's (a really mean) one behind C# (or Java or Swift etc).

I like to think that JVM, .NET languages and their tooling, and to certain extent Swift (with Playgrounds), are ways to have those things back, even if not 100% the same.