Worth investing in Guile?

[Max Polk]

Just as I beginning to get started adding guile support to my 
application, a colleague provided a contrary view of the usefulness of 
guile.  It all started out with an article from a decade-old emacs user 
changing to gvim:

> http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca/opinions/editors.html

And continued with this mockery of lisp, and by extension, guile:

>  One part of the article mirrors what I felt about emacs all along:
>  I want to use my text editor for programming, I don't want to have
>  to program my text editor. I don't want to delve into the arcana of elisp.
>  Lisp is a dead language, like Pascal and Ada.

It made me wonder if I should start down this road at all if the general 
consensus was that Lisp is a dead language.  My colleague ended with a 
scathing assault on blindly following someone down the path RMS has 
charted when [he says] fewer and fewer are following that voice:

>  With the advent and rise of Linux, GNOME, Sourceforge, Ximian,
>  Freshmeat, and others, Stallman's abrasive and over-earnest style is
>  making GNU a footnote. As the author points out, fifteen years ago,
>  Stallman could shout "Everyone will now use Guile" and it would
>  happen. Today, the response is, "Yeah, right" and a big yawn. While
>  Stallman and his cronies are off inventing new languages and systems
>  no one will use, the core of the Open Source world is continuing to
>  slip from his grasp. The major packages from GNU aren't even
>  maintained by Stallman's acolytes any more: gcc is a behemoth that
>  lives on its own, glibc is now maintained principally by two Red Hat
>  employees, binutils and GNU make haven't significantly changed in
>  years. If Stallman wants to trace the origin of this trend, he
>  doesn't even need to look as far as Linus Torvalds, he can look in
>  his own back yard. The egcs split from gcc about ten years ago
>  (yikes!!!) should have been the warning shot over the bow for
>  him. The GNU group wanted to follow Stallman wherever he went, the
>  egcs group just wanted to produce a superior compiler. Shortly after
>  the split, it became apparent that users wanted quality and weren't
>  impressed with Stallman's vision. If the GNU team hadn't swallowed
>  their pride, no one would even know what gcc is today.

Does he have a point here, and if so, what other options are available 
for scripting languages to be embedded into applications?  Are there 
python or perl [or any other] embedding hooks for external scripting of 
your application that are just as reasonable to use as Guile?