From whence Lisp envy?

[Patrick W]

Aaron K. Johnson <akjmicro at yahoo.com> writes:

>  Are all these kowtows to Lisp justified?

If you interpret a few nods in Lisp's direction as "kowtows", it
suggests a pretty childish outlook on your part.  (If you must see it
in adversarial terms, why not see it as a bit of friendly rivalry
between the two best players in the field?  These 'rivals', if they
must be rivals, have quite a lot to teach each other).

> (If you ask me, looking at Python's syntax and Libraries should make
> Lispers kowtow to Python).

If pretty syntax and convenient libraries are your most important
criteria (which is I don't mean to criticise, BTW), then it's natural
that you'd see it this way.  Others don't have the same priorities.
Lisp is, in many ways, a more powerful language than Python, but
Python is often more convenient.  It's possible to be happy with both,
and grow out of the stupid psychological need for one to somehow
"triumph" over the other, which many of us apparently have
w.r.t. programming languages.

> Anyway, it seems to me that more things can be done quite easily in
> Python where they take some hoop jumping in Lisp.

Undoubtedly true.

> And the arguments that python doesn't scale up to larger systems as
> well as Lisp are unfounded and theoretical (two qualities it seems
> many die-hard Lispers value in their arguments)

But this is just cheerleading.  Who's arguing that Python doesn't
scale up?  Which arguments about Lisp's scalability are "unfounded and
theoretical"?  Get real, man, or put on a skirt and wave your
streamers without pretence.

> I would bet any day that two programmers of equal skill in Lisp and
> Python respectively dueling it out would end in Python winning the
> day for its rapid prototyping stregths.

Rah rah rah! Go Python Go! ;-)