merits of Lisp vs Python

[Jon Harrop]

Bill Atkins wrote:
> Despite its dynamism, Lisp is quite compilable.  For example, I can
> redefine classes, functions, macros, etc. at runtime and compiled code
> referring to the old code will still work.  You are conflating
> dynamism with interpretedness, and that's incorrect.

There is clearly a trade-off. Look at my ray tracer benchmark, for example:

  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/languages.html

The static languages are significantly faster.

I think Python can hope to be as fast as SBCL-compiled Lisp, after a huge
amount of work on Python compilers, but it will never be as fast as the
compiled static languages.

On that ray tracer, Python might be able to approach OCaml's brevity but it
will be orders of magnitude slower as long as it is interpreted. Compiling
Python to a decent bytecode might give better performance, but OCaml
bytecode is 30x slower than native code on this benchmark.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet