Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

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Alexander Schmolck wrote:
> As common lisp and scheme demonstrate you can have high level of dynamism (and
> in a number of things both are more dynamic than python) and still get very
> good performance (in some cases close to or better than C).

Just for personal enlightment, where do you think Lisp is more dynamic
of Python?
Can you new name a few features?

> What's far more interesting to me, however, is that I think there a good
> reasons to suspect python's slowness is more of a feature than a flaw: I'd not
> be suprised if on the whole it greatly increases programmer productivity and
> results in clearer and more uniform code.
>
> If you know the language to be dog slow any way, you're much less likely to
> waste your time (and that of future maintainers) on the pointless
> microoptimizations that geeks so love. Also, since only builtins have
> reasonable performance there's added motiviation to become very familiar with
> the available builtins (and standard libarary) and far less temptation to roll
> one's own version of say dict.setdefault (even if it it sucks). The fact that
> non-standard library code is inherently somewhat inferior (because it will
> either be written in python and slow or written in C and a pain to install)
> adds further incentive to attempt community wide standardization.
>
> I think it's not unreasonable to speculate that all this decreases production,
> maintenance and reuse costs of python code considerably, so much in fact that
> python's very slowness represents part of its competetive edge over languages
> that are in some ways better engineered and more capable.

I think you have a very good point here. +1000!

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