Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

[Terry Hancock]

On Sunday 01 December 2002 09:00 am,  Kenny Tilton wrote:
> maney at pobox.com wrote:
> > Kenny Tilton <ktilton at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> I am close! I have asked twice here what folks use to do Python, and I 
> have yet to get one solitary answer. That is /really/ strange. Anyway, 
> what IDE /do/ you use?

Personally, I've never been too impressed with IDEs in general -- too little 
payback for too much buy-in. I have used a variety of editors, but my 
personal favorite is gvim.   I briefly tried Xemacs and Emacs for other 
tasks, but there's way too much crud to remember.  I also couldn't get them 
to scroll sensibly, which I find really irritating.  And nothing irritates me 
more than some darned AI trying to move my cursor around and complete my 
sentences while I'm typing.  Just give me something simple and controllable. 
In short, if I had to use Emacs to do my work, I think I'd find another job.  
I mean I really admire the folks who made it, but Emacs itself is a **dog** 
(yes, I know some people love it -- there's no accounting for taste).

I don't like remembering things about editors -- I have more important things 
to use those grey cells for, and the fact is, I type fast enough that I 
really don't care about fancy commands.  If I want indenting, I just use the 
darn tab key or spacebar. If I want to indent a block, I use vim's sed-like 
commands.   Want to select a block of text? Use the mouse!  I spend more time 
thinking about and testing code than typing it, so what does it matter?  It 
would take me longer to remember the "right" way than it does to just make 
the changes I want, and this way my head's not cluttered up thinking about 
the editor.

I've edited quite a bit of code with really dumb editors, including the 
built-in text widget in Netscape (for Zope) and Windows' NotePad. I think any 
language that requires me to learn and limit myself to a specific editor, is 
a major pain.  And all that knowledge will go to waste anyway, if I have to 
switch to another editor for environment reasons.  So it's better to just 
learn what the output is supposed to look like, and not lean so much on the 
editor.  (The only exception is syntax coloring -- a wonderful invention!).

My usual IDE is X-windows or KDE -- I just open a terminal window or two and 
two or three sessions of gvim and lay them out as I see fit. Cycling is maybe 
slightly longer this way, but at least I know it's starting normally.  Also, 
when I'm testing web application code, I do it in-place on a development 
server, and that's slow to begin with (you have to restart a lot, and it 
takes a certain unavoidable amount of time).

I know there are short cuts to avoid some of this start up time, but AFAIK, 
every one of them introduces some extra limitation or hidden failure mode, 
and that increases the number of variables in the test.  I've been burnt alot 
by using "testbeds" that turned out not to match the real world very well, 
and so I have strong inclination to test in-place.  I've even developed a 
whole web application (in a supposedly cross-platform environment) on one 
Linux development server, only to find that it broke completely when run on 
FreeBSD. So much for cross-platform. Now I only trust it after it has run 
correctly on BOTH servers.

There are of course, people, who use IDLE or Emacs to edit Python, and who 
seem to be very happy with their respective choices.  I suspect if you are 
used to Emacs, you will want to just get a Python mode for it.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com

"Python takes the pain out of programming ...
       ...  and Zope puts it back again."