If Scheme is so good why MIT drops it?

[Frank Buss]

fft1976 wrote:

> How do you explain that something as inferior as Python beat Lisp in
> the market place despite starting 40 years later.

Python is not that bad. Unlike Lisp, there is much less undefined behavior,
there is one free unique implementation on the 3 major platforms Linux,
Windows and MacOS X, which is stable, support multithreading and has a
default GUI library binding, which is difficult to find for Lisp (e.g. I
don't know of a free modern and stable Lisp implemenation with
mulithreading support for Windows, with a licence with which you can use it
in closed source commercial programs, like you can do with Python). Many
problems in the Lispbuilder mailing list are related to problems due to
different operating systems and Lisp implementations.

But maybe the most important point: The syntax looks simple compared to
Common Lisp (much less parentheses) and if you program in Python, it feels
easier for programmer newbies. As Sussman says: "undergraduate’s initial
experiences maximally productive". And this holds even for more experienced
programmers. If you know already a bit of C, it is easy to use Python, but
without the ability to do silly errors like writing out of array bounds (of
course, you can do this in Lisp, too, if you remember to set the safe mode
and if you use the right implementation). GC helps, too, to make the
programming task easier than in C. Some more arguments, e.g. 5 times less
program size than Java or C and more productive programmers:

http://www.artima.com/intv/speedP.html

(of course, an interview with Van Rossum might be a bit biased :-)

-- 
Frank Buss, fb at frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de