Why aren't we all speaking LISP now?

[Grant Edwards]

On 12 May 2001 03:51:56 -0400, Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:

>On Thursday I went to a panel of preeminent language designers.  The
>consenus is that we *are* all speaking Lisp right now, more or less,
>only the name has been changed to Python.

Why do people think Python is so Lisp-like? I just don't get
it. I've written some mid-sized apps in Scheme and some
small-to-mid sized ones in Python, and I don't think the
languages feel the same at all:

  1. Python doesn't have tail-recursion (AFAIK).
  
  2. In Python the representations of program and data are
     completely different.  (I mean the external
     representations, not the internal data structures used by
     the interpreter.)
     
  3. Python's "lambda" is crippled.
  
  4. Lisp's object model was slapped on as an afterthought.  

Even simple things like iterating over a sequence of objects is
done in a completely different way:  in Lisp you do something
to the first item then recurse.  In Python, you use "for x in
list".

I think Python feels a lot more like either "dynamically typed
Modula-3", or "non-message-passing Smalltalk" than any sort of
Lisp.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  INSIDE, I have the
                                  at               same personality disorder
                               visi.com            as LUCY RICARDO!!