Lisp development with macros faster than Python development?..

[Larry Bates]

You don't say how long it took to develop the "macros" but
you should see what kind of website an experienced Zope/Plone
programmer can whip up in a few minutes.

Acceleration in programming has always been about the "Standard
Library" (not only Python's standard library but also your
standard library).  I'm talking about stable, debugged,
documented macros, functions and classes that the programmer can
use to quickly do very complex tasks.  I discovered this well
over 30 years ago and taught many young programmers and
University students this very important "trick".  As you write
software you will eventually come across common routines that
are used in almost every software package (logging, reading
from CSV files, date/time manipulation, ...).  If you have lots
of these to choose from in your library, you will produce code
10-100 times faster than those that start over every time AND
the code will be MANY times more reliable because you are
utilizing stable code that has been debugged over a long period
of time.  You will also be producing code that is more
"maintainable".  Discovered a bug in a library routine? Fix it
and then it is fixed in 100's (or 1000's) of existing programs
that use it.

-Larry Bates

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?
> 
> thanks!
> 
> Chris
>