merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Boddie]

Mark Tarver wrote:
>
> Thanks;  a quick read of your reference to Norvig's analysis
>
> http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html
>
> seems to show that Python is a cut down (no macros) version of Lisp
> with a worse performance.

I'm quite interested in Lisp, at least from the perspective of seeing
how it supports particular kinds of development activities where you'd
have to "do extra laps" with languages like Python, but while it's
possible to frame lots of languages as being Lisp with something
removed, such observations neglect the origins and objectives of those
languages (and the contributions of a number of other languages).

>  The only substantial advantage I can see is that GUI, and Web libraries are standard.

This is actually something of a running joke in the Python community.
There's one sort of de-facto GUI library which many people swap out for
one of the many other GUI libraries available, many of which are
actually very good and relate to modern, actively and heavily developed
graphical user interface environments. Meanwhile, Web standardisation
in the Python scene needs more attention, although there's so much
activity and so many end-to-end solutions to choose from that Python is
quite a reasonable choice for Web development.

>  This confirms my suspicion that Lisp is losing out to newbies because of its
> lack of standard support for the things many people want to do.

There was a thread on comp.lang.lisp recently [1] where Ian Jackson of
Debian fame attempted to raise awareness of a lack of apparent
community standards for Lisp, amongst other things, at least for those
people developing software for various Free Software platforms. I think
a re-reading of the many and varied responses will give you some ideas
about where the Lisp community stands in that and in other respects.

Paul

[1]
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/ea994085b54de92d