From whence Lisp envy?

[Samuele Pedroni]

> The macro discussion isn't lisp envy, it's scheme envy.  I was told
> off-list that all those years I wrote scheme I was fooling myself in
> thinking I was writing lisp.
>
> Python has a lot of things in common with scheme. To me, the most
> important is that everything in it went in after careful thought, and
> wasn't thrown in because someone thought it would be cool. At this
> point, python has everything scheme had, usually does it better, and
> has other cool stuff that's not part of the scheme standard as well.
>
> Except for macros. Macros were hard to do right in scheme, and I've
> heard lispers denigrate them. I suspect it will be even harder to do
> macros right for Python. Especially since one of the goals *has* to be
> avoiding what happened to the lisp community. The scheme community
> seemed to have avoided it, at least until the introduction of
> guile. On the other hand, the scheme community was also pretty small
> until the introduction of guile, so we'll have to see.
>

you may want to read this not too old python-dev thread

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/1076860

regards.