Benefits of moving from Python to Common Lisp?

[Thomas F. Burdick]

"Morten W. Petersen" <morten at thingamy.net> writes:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm currently doing some research, to see if it could be an advantage to
> use Common Lisp instead of Python (currently Python and Zope [1] are used
> to build web applications).
> 
> While doing this, Google has provided two interesting documents (search
> for 'lisp vs python'):
> 
>   http://www.strout.net/python/pythonvslisp.html

The very top of the page says:

  The relative merits of the two languages are compared in 11
  categories. In an attempt to make a more quantitative comparison, each
  language is assigned a score from 0 to 10 in each category. These
  scores are then combined, with appropriate weighting factors, to
  produce a total score. Each score was assigned as independently as
  possible, before weighting factors were decided; and weighting factors
  were chosen without examining the scores. In this way, the final
  scores are made as objective as possible.

>From reading this alone, it is obvious that the author has an agenda,
and is about to embark on a completely biased, subjective comparison,
who's results he has already decided.  Plus, he's wrapping it all up
in pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, which is unforgivable.

After the first page, I was going to pick the page apart, or at least
try to address some its more serious flaws, but there's major,
misleading flaws at least one to a paragraph.  I don't know if it was
meant to be misleading, or just biased, but looking at Marco
Antoniotti's reply, I'd guess it's intentionally misleading.

I'd try to forget you ever saw it.  Not because it favors Python over
Lisp, but because it does so dishonestly.  On the other hand, I think
I'm glad that guy doesn't use Lisp :)

>   http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html

I'd read this before, and found it interesting.  Not the least because
it's by Norvig, whose opinion I respect.  It convinced me that if I'm
in a situation where I would use CLISP (a bytecode implementation of
CL), but can't, that Python is something I should consider.  It seems
like an underpowered Lisp pretender, but then, there are a lot of
worse things to be.

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