Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

[Alexander Schmolck]

"Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> writes:

> Alexander Schmolck 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.
> 
> > So ironically, some share of python's success might actually be due to
> > ignorance on Guido's part
> 
> it didn't, for even a millisecond, strike you that maybe, just maybe, the
> "make it as dynamic as we possibly can" choice was made on purpose ?

Python is far less dynamic than smalltalk, and presumably also self (last time
I checked there was no implementation for x86, so I have no practical
experience with self). Even common lisp could reasonably be called more
dynamic than python. And all these language communities did in fact still
manage to come up with efficient implementations.

Thus the "make it as dynamic as it possibly can" choice is hardly the cause
for python's slowness, so what's your point?

My point was that Guido probably (and fortunately!) was unaware of the extent
to which you can have both dynamism and speed and the extent to which very
dynamic languages are suitable for writing robust software. I'm pretty sure I
remember reading stuff by Guido himself in which he indicated that he
originally thought that a language with a similar level of dynamism as python
had to be slow anyway and I'm also pretty sure that I read some other stuff by
him which indicates that he thought a language like python would be only
suitable for relatively small scale development. If you don't doubt he wrote
that I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about (because clearly both
statements are wrong), if you do maybe I or someone else can find the right
reference, or maybe I really misremembered.

Anyayw, I'm pretty sure that Guido wouldn't have bothered to add things like
compiler macros to python, whatever his level of his technical expertise
concerning efficient implementations of highly dynamic languages might have
been.

However I don't find it at all implausible to assume that had Guido known all
the stuff that say, David Ungar and Guy Steele were aware of at the same time,
python would have come out not necessarily less dynamic but considerably
faster -- to its own detriment.

'as