Lisp development with macros faster than Python development?..

[Kirk Job Sluder]

"seberino at spawar.navy.mil" <seberino at spawar.navy.mil> writes:

> 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....

Well, for me, I was playing around with lisp and developing in python
for my little scripts until I finally hit something that could leverage
a lisp macro to create a new type of iterator.  After that things moved
foward at a rapid speed.  Another point in lisp's favor is that I prefer
nested s-expressions to the sometimes ugly mashup of functional and OO
calls that I end up creating in python.

On the other hand, python benefits from a much richer standard library,
so some of the things you take for granted in python such as
string.split(None,3) need to be found or created.  

  

> thanks!
> 
> Chris
> 

-- 
Kirk Job-Sluder
"The square-jawed homunculi of Tommy Hilfinger ads make every day an
existential holocaust."  --Scary Go Round