Is Python for me?

[Tim Peters]

[Kendall G. Clark]
> ...
> So lemme see if I've got this right:
>
> 1. There's something Alex Martelli doesn't know; and

Na, that's an illusion.  Alex is working hard to keep his posts under 50Kb
these days, so he can't afford to divulge more than the tiniest fraction of
what he knows.

> 2. the Timbot is (still) spreading about the hoary 'Common Lisp is
> *really* huge' myth[1]?

In terms of language size, yes.  CL is a big language -- it's a *huge*
language.  The original questioner was attracted to functional languages,
and they tend to be on the minimal side (notwithstanding that in recent
years they've grudgingly allowed that some people need to do I/O <0.9
wink>).

> Martelli omissions and a Timbot imprecision in one night's
> news-reading session? c.l.py is slipping! :>

The question is whether that precedes or follows Python ballooning out of
control.  Newsgroups and languages reflect each other, but it's hard to say
which is more cause and which effect <wink>.

BTW, I suspect the biggest contributor to the myth that Lisp
*implementations* are huge may still be Emacs.  More than a decade ago that
stood for Eighty Megs And Constantly Swapping, and I doubt it's gone on a
diet since then.  Doesn't matter that Lisp has nothing to do with that; it's
like the equally bizarre myth that Python's treatment of whitespace was
taken from Fortran.

myths-are-too-comforting-to-fight-ly y'rs  - tim