If Scheme is so good why MIT drops it?

[Carl Banks]

On Jul 19, 4:29 pm, Tim Daneliuk <tun... at tundraware.com> wrote:
> Carl Banks wrote:
> > On Jul 19, 10:33 am, fft1976 <fft1... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Jul 19, 9:55 am, Frank Buss <f... at frank-buss.de> wrote:
>
> >>> E.g. the number system: In many Lisp
> >>> implementations (/ 2 3) results in the fractional object 2/3. In Python 2.6
> >>> "2 / 3" results in "0". Looks like with Python 3.1 they have fixed it, now
> >>> it returns "0.6666666666", which will result in lots of fun for porting
> >>> applications written for Python <= 2.6.
> >> How do you explain that something as inferior as Python beat Lisp in
> >> the market place despite starting 40 years later.
>
> > There was no reason to crosspost this here--looking at the original
> > thread on comp.lang.lisp it seems they were doing a surprisingly good
> > job discussing the issue.
>
> > I'm guessing it's because the fanboy Lispers like Ken Tifton were busy
> > with a flamewar in another thread (LISP vs PROLOG vs HASKELL).
>
> > Carl Banks
>
> This is an incredibly important discussion

It might be an important question but a discussion on Usenet about it
is utterly useless.


> and is much weaker because
> it does not also include Pascal, BASIC, Ada, Oberon and Forth.

In the same way that a movie is weaker because the director edited out
the bad scenes.


> In fact,
> picking a computer language is the most important discussion in
> Computer Science and eclipses even P=NP? in significance. I sure hope
> we can keep this thread going for a few months.

Please feel free to extend this flame-war along for a few months on
comp.lang.lisp.  Not here.


Carl Banks