merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

Ken Tilton <kentilton at gmail.com> writes:
> yeah, I think it is. Folks don't vary that much. If every Lisp
> programmer also reports parens disappearing at about thirty days, any
> given non-Lispnik can pretty much bet on the same experience.

I think an editing program that balances parens automatically is near
indispensible for writing Lisp code.  I can't stand writing Lisp
without Emacs.

> My suspicion goes the other way, and is based not on punctuation,
> rather on imperative vs functional. In Lisp every form returns a
> value, so I do not have all these local variables around that, in the
> strecth of an interesting function, take on a stream of values and
> transformations to finally come up with some result, meaning to
> understand code I have to jump back and forth thru the code to see the
> lineage of a value and figure out its net semantics. Too much like work.

Python has been steadily getting better in this regard.