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

[Ian Bicking]

On Sat, 2002-11-09 at 08:29, Johannes Grødem wrote:
> > But that's not going to be mainstream.  In a heterogeneous environment
> > both Lisp and Smalltalk have serious issues.
> 
> This is really implementation-specific, not strictly language-
> specific.  There are Common Lisps that integrate well with C.  There
> are even Lisps that let you use inline-assembler and inline-C in your
> Lisp-code.

Certainly -- after thought, I now see why Python's canonical
implementation is very important.  Whatever problems Python has, we all
have them together.  Whatever features and extensions it has, we all
have them together.

Even when you consider all the features available in different
implementations of Lisp -- what would it look like if all of them were
available?  Common Lisp is already a huge hodge-podge of stuff...
there's no minimalism.  Then if you add more implementation-specific
aspects, it can only get worse.  Python manages to introduce features
without such messiness because nothing is implementation-specific (or
everything is).  

  Ian