merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

Ken Tilton <kentilton at gmail.com> writes:
> Not sure I understand why, unless you mean folks were raving about
> Lisp in the 60s. Today's raving is about a much different language,
> though the core elegance remains, and is as much about the contrast
> with other languages as it is about the pleasure of Lisp itself. Those
> raving about Lisp are quite accomplished at all those other languages,
> and know about what they are talking. I doubt the Pythonistas weighing
> in on this thread ever got far at all with Lisp, so... should they
> really be offering comparative analysis?

I've used and implemented Lisp but am not a real expert.  Some other
Python newsgroup regulars are very knowledgeable (more than me) about
it.  Peter Norvig (author of that comparison page) wrote a Lisp book,
if I remember correctly.

> >  Personally, I never like Lisp syntax; Clearly some people, some
> > fanatic judging by this thread :) think easily in prefix.  I am not
> > one of them.

The syntax is a pretty superficial thing.  The reaction from outsiders
to Lisp's parentheses and Python's indentation-based structure is
about the same.  You get used to it either way.

> The typical Pythonista values clean code but trembles in the face of
> macros, which exist to hide boilerplate. That means the only thing
> showing in any given block of code is exactly the interesting variable
> and function names. Talk about readability.

There is just not that much boilerplate in Python code, so there's
not so much need to hide it.

> Much of Lisp's power would be lost on a non-programmer, but Lisp might
> make a programmer out of a non-programmer if they had it in them. You
> might have the right language for you because what Python does have is
> lotsa libraries, and if you are just hacking scripts to glue together
> libraries the expressiveness of Lisp is more than offset by the better
> library support in Python.

Python is more expressive than Lisp in the sense that its built-in
datatypes and simple syntax for using them has to be done through
kludgy macros and libraries with Lisp.  I would say Lisp's facilities
for developing very large programs are better, and (for now) Lisp has
much more serious compilers.  See the PyPy project for what's
happening in that direction with Python.