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

[John Baxter]

Comments related to the thread, but not answering anyone in particular.

I was around during LISP's very early days at MIT (as one of several 
thousand people who didn't understand anything John McCarthy said beyond 
"hello" ;-)).  But I wasn't involved.  I did get involved with the odd 
little interpreted language CoMIT which the Linguistics Department was 
working with.  (And in Spring of 1958 took a class from a youngish Noam 
Chomsky.)

LISP was not as pleasant to work in then as any of the implementations 
are now:  the interpreter was run in a batch job shop environment with 
source code on cards.  The interpreter gave no results at all if one was 
even one ) short of balancing the (s.  Meaning that it was easy to spot 
the LISP users:  they walked around with cards full of )s in their 
pockets to slap onto card decks.  [The interpreter gave some sort of 
information and results if it saw too many )s.]

If I had my choice and the time to do so, I'd probably do nearly 
everything in LISP...as it is I haven't used LISP since Mac Common LISP 
moved on from Apple Cambridge.

I spent lots of time with Forth in the late 70s to mid 1980s, as a hobby 
(and an excuse for lunch gatherings with Guy Kelly et al).

I've also exercised Smalltalk...I wouldn't be likely to do everything in 
Smalltalk, although I like the language and might do something in it.

The rainfall recorder I use now (nothing fancy:  manual entry of 
readings from the $2.95 high-imprecision rain guage) began in MacForth 
in 1989, moved to SmallTalk, moved on to Prograph, to MacApp (Pascal 
form) for a while, and back to the Prograph version which I still use.

We were using Perl heavily when I stumbled onto Python.  How?  Well, the 
Bellevue, WA, Tower Books suffered water damage in a rain, and the 
water-damaged "Programming Python" was priced to sell (before it 
rotted).  I found I liked the language, showed it to the boss, and 
...now we do Python (starting before 1.5).  [We were an early corporate 
member of PSA, and I was a member, despite the odd methods one had to 
use to join and pay. ;-)]

Why Python and not the others?  No deep Computer Science reasons (CS 
didn't exist yet in my college years).

Rather:  Python just feels right.

  --John (who uses RPN calculators and can't manage Algebraic ones)