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

[Pascal Costanza]

Alexander Schmolck wrote:
> Pascal Costanza <costanza at web.de> writes:
> 
> 


>>Where do you get these numbers from?
> 
> 
> The learning time? From the relevant authorities from comp.lang.lisp, of
> course, in this case Erik Naggum :) 18 months is the time he expects it will
> take people to become CL experts (NB: expert *in* the language *not* expert
> user, which obviously takes longer):

Hmm, I think it depends on your previous knowledge.

> Anyway, the number wasn't meant that seriously by me, the only thing that
> matters is that it is comparatively high. The investment needed to become
> productive in CL and the effect on the likelihood of people evaluating CL at
> all is a more serious issue than lispers generally seem to appreciate. (Note
> that by productive I mean *competitive* to alternatives you already know or
> could learn instead). Clearly people will only be wiling to make such an
> investment when the perceived potential gains match it. The thing is, however,
> that with languages like python, you can get many of the benefits (plus
> additional ones) and few of the uncertainties with much less of an investment
> (read risk).

Probably yes. Part of the investment you have to make in the case of 
Common Lisp is to choosing the right vendor, determing which libraries 
are supported by a particular implementation, and choosing a good 
tutorial (esp. not an old-fashioned one), and so on. This can be 
tedious, especially this requires knowledge about Common Lisp that you 
don't have upfront when you want to learn it. So you have a point there.

>>I have started to take a serious look at Lisp and Scheme in April (i.e., April
>>2002). I have started to implement a Virtual Machine for Java bytecode in
>>Common Lisp in July 2002 (i.e., a just-in-time compiler that translates Java
>>bytecode to Common Lisp code at load time). The core of this Virtual Machine
>>executes the first few test programs since the beginning of this month
>>(November 2002).
[...]

> BTW, doing something along those lines for python would also be quite
> interesting (any chance that this might be your next hobby project :)?  I
> guess such an effort could also be quite useful to the CL community (among
> other things because python has lots of quite usable libraries and because a
> successful project along those lines might attract quite a bit of attention).

Basically I would be interested in something along these lines. But not 
at the moment - first, I'd like to get the JVM to a reasonable state.

BTW, I agree that this would be very worthwhile...


Pascal


-- 
Pascal Costanza               University of Bonn
mailto:costanza at web.de        Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de  Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)