Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Kenny Tilton]

Toni Nikkanen wrote:

> kalath at lycos.com (Mark Brady) writes:
> 
> 
>>just me, I prefer S-exps and there seems to be a rebirth in the Scheme
>>and Common Lisp communities at the moment. Ironically this seems to
>>have been helped by python. I learned python then got interested in
>>it's functional side and ended up learning Scheme and Common Lisp. 
> 
> 
> It's be interesting to know where people got the idea of learning
> Scheme/LISP from (apart from compulsory university courses)? 

<g> We wonder alike. That's why I started:

    http://alu.cliki.net/The%20Road%20to%20Lisp%20Survey

That recently got repotted from another cliki and it's a little mangled, 
but until after ILC2003 I am a little too swamped to clean it up. But 
there is still a lot of good stuff in there. On this page I grouped 
folks according to different routes to Lisp (in the broadest sense of 
that term): http://alu.cliki.net/The%20RtLS%20by%20Road

You will find some old-timers because I made the survey super-inclusive, 
but my real interest was the same as yours: where are the New Lispniks 
coming from?

Speaking of which, Mark Brady cited Python as a stepping-stone, and I 
have been thinking that might happen, but the survey has yet to confirm. 
Here's one: http://alu.cliki.net/Robbie%20Sedgewick's%20Road%20to%20Lisp

So Ping! Mark Brady, please hie ye (and all the others who followed the 
same road to Lisp) to the survey and correct the record.

I think
> that for me, it was the LPC language used in LPmuds. It had a
> frightening feature called lambda closures, and useful functions such
> as map and filter. Then one day I just decided to bite the bullet and
> find out where the heck all that stuff came from (my background was
> strongly in C-like languages at that point. LPC is like C with some
> object-oriented and some FP features.)
> 
> Yes, I know, there's nothing frightening in lambda closures. But the
> way they were implemented in LPC (actually just the syntax) was
> terrible :)

You could cut and paste that into the survey as well. :)

kenny