Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Andrew Dalke]

Rainer Joswig
> > I thought these numbers were bogus. Weren't many
> > of them just guesses with actually zero data
> > or methodology behind them???

Pascal Costanza
> Apart from that, what does the author mean by "Lisp"? Is it Common Lisp
> or some other Lisp dialect? Scheme?

As I mentioned, I don't have the primary sources, so I can't
give any more information about the data.

In general, there are very few methodological studies on the
effectiveness of different languages on general purpose
programming problems when used by sets of people with
roughly comparable experience.  The only other one I have
is Prechelt's "An empirical comparison ..."
        http://www.ipd.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/
with the followup of Java v. Lisp at
        http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf
That data also suggests that Tcl/Perl/Python/Lisp development time
is comparable.

> According to this table, Modula-2 and Lisp are in the same league - I
> have used both languages, and this just doesn't align with my experience.

Good thing I didn't try to skew the data by leaving that out.  ;)

> Furthermore, CLOS can be regarded as a superset of Smalltalk. How can it
> be that Smalltalk is more than three times better than Lisp? Even if you
> take Scheme that doesn't come with an object system out of the box, you
> can usually add one that is at least as powerful as Smalltalk. Or did
> they add the LOC of infrastructure libraries to their results?

Again, I don't have the primary source.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com