Lisp development with macros faster than Python development?..

[Dave Brueck]

seberino at spawar.navy.mil wrote:
> I've been reading the beloved Paul Graham's "Hackers and Painters".
> He claims he developed a web app at light speed using Lisp and lots
> of macros.
> 
> It got me curious if Lisp
> is inherently faster to develop complex apps in.  It would seem if you
> could create your own language in Lisp using macros that that would be
> quite an advantage....
> 
> I realize that Python has operator overloading and OOP so I'm not sure.
> 
> Any ideas?  Any *evidence* one way or another?

Well, his Viaweb company was founded in about '95, right? So he probably just 
used Lisp because Python wasn't as well known yet. ;-)

IMO one of Python's strengths over Lisp is that it plays well with many other 
technologies. It should be remembered that Graham's use of Lisp in Viaweb was in 
building a web application, so that Lisp's main links to the "outside world" 
were the filesystem and Apache. They didn't use a database, and Apache had to be 
  modified in order to work with Lisp.