Whitespace as syntax (was Re: Python Rocks!)

[Tim Peters]

[Paul Prescod]
> ...
> Is or isn't there a real reason that Lisp is almost 50 years old,
> still widely praised by those "in the know" and is still not popular
> yet?

Every computer language user should read Richard Gabriel's famous "worse is
better" paper, which may be the finest thought on this to have come out of
the Lisp world.  Widely available; here's a nice HTML version:

     http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/good-news.html

Python is certainly a "New Jersey" language in the view of that paper.

I'll add two others:

1) An amazingly persistent conviction that "Lisp is slow", despite that this
hasn't been *true* for decades (it was true at the start, at least compared
to the Fortrans and COBOLs it originally "competed" against -- and Fortran
and COBOL suffer similarly persistent delusions, based on versions of the
languages that are no longer relevant).

2) Deep hatred of Lisp's syntax.  Just seems to be a fact of life -- and you
know as well as anyone how irrational people can get over a *good* thing
like Python's lack of curly braces <wink>.

See Gabriel for the "deep" reasons, though.

would-have-helped-if-they-had-larry-or-even-guido<wink>-too-ly
    y'rs  - tim