Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

[Kay Schluehr]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 05:18:39 -0800, Kay Schluehr wrote:
>
> >> 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.
> >
> > Yes, it's Guidos master-plan to lock programmers into a slow language
> > in order to dominate them for decades. Do you also believe that Al
> > Quaida is a phantom organization of the CIA founded by neocons in the
> > early '90s who planned to invade Iraq?
>
> Of course not. The alternative, that Osama has been able to lug his
> dialysis machine all over the Pakistan and Afghan mountains without being
> detected for four years is *much* more believable. *wink*

Osama? Who is Osama? A media effect, a CNN invention.

> I don't think it was the poster's implication that Guido deliberately
> created a slow language for the sake of slowness. I think the implication
> was more that Guido made certain design choices that increased
> productivity and code clarity. (That much is uncontroversial.) Where the
> poster has ruffled some feathers is his suggestion that if Guido had only
> known more about the cutting edge of language design from CS, Python would
> have been much faster, but also much less productive, clear and popular.
>
> I guess the feather ruffling is because of the suggestion that Guido
> merely _didn't_know_ about language features that would have increased
> Python's speed at the cost of productivity, rather than deliberately
> choose to emphasis productivity at the expense of some speed.
>
>
>
> --
> Steven.

Alexanders hypothesis is completely absurd. It turned out over the
years that capabilities of Python optimization are lower than those of
Lisp and Smalltalk. But its a system effect and epiphenomenon of
certain design decisions. This might change with PyPy - who knows? The
Lisp/Smalltalk design is ingenious, radical and original and both
languages were considered too slow for many real-world-applications
over decades. But no one has ever claimed that Alan Kay intentionally
created a slow language in order to hold the herd together - and it
accidentally turned out to be reasonably fast with JIT technology in
the late 90s.

Smalltalk was killed by Java while Lisp was killed by the paradigm
shift to OO in the early 90s. The IT world has absolutely no interest
in the hobby horses of computer scientists or language lovers (like
me). It consolidates in direction of a small set of Algol successors
namely C,C++,Java and C# and some dynamically typechecked languages
like Perl, Python and Ruby that play nice with the bold mainstream
languages as their more flexible addition. A conspiracy like theory
used to explain what's going on is needless.

Kay