merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

"tac-tics" <tactics40 at gmail.com> writes:
> I think the lesson here is that LISP is the language you use when you
> want mathematical elegance and perfection and Python is the language
> you use if you want to actually program stuff.

That's really a misperception.  Lisp is extremely pragmatic in
addition to traditionally having more mathematically oriented
developers and users.  There is a saying that Lisp is a ball of mud;
you can throw whatever you want into it and it's still Lisp.  Python's
current implementations and the supposedly fancy Python applications
that I've heard of are toys compared to what's been done in Lisp even
on the much smaller machines of decades gone by.

What I'd say is that the most interesting period of Lisp development
was probably the 1970's and 1980's, trailing off into the beginning of
the 1990's.  Since then Lisp has gotten kind of stultified, although
one of the cll posters claims there's now a revival going on (maybe
true).  It seems to me that many Lisp users and developers moved on to
the ML family in the 1990's and maybe have been moving from ML to
Haskell in more recent times.