Home Original page

From whence Lisp envy?

Mike Meyer mwm at mired.org
Mon Dec 16 19:07:57 EST 2002 
Aaron K. Johnson <akjmicro at yahoo.com> writes:

> Some of the threads in this newsgroup seem to indicate 'lisp envy' or guilt
> (i.e. the macro discussion). I say Python has its own amazing virtues. Are all
> these kowtows to Lisp justified? (If you ask me, looking at Python's syntax and
> Libraries should make Lispers kowtow to Python). Anyway, it seems to me that
> more things can be done quite easily in Python where they take some hoop
> jumping in Lisp. And the arguments that python doesn't scale up to larger
> systems as well as Lisp are unfounded and theoretical (two qualities it seems
> many die-hard Lispers value in their arguments) 

The macro discussion isn't lisp envy, it's scheme envy.  I was told
off-list that all those years I wrote scheme I was fooling myself in
thinking I was writing lisp.

Python has a lot of things in common with scheme. To me, the most
important is that everything in it went in after careful thought, and
wasn't thrown in because someone thought it would be cool. At this
point, python has everything scheme had, usually does it better, and
has other cool stuff that's not part of the scheme standard as well.

Except for macros. Macros were hard to do right in scheme, and I've
heard lispers denigrate them. I suspect it will be even harder to do
macros right for Python. Especially since one of the goals *has* to be
avoiding what happened to the lisp community. The scheme community
seemed to have avoided it, at least until the introduction of
guile. On the other hand, the scheme community was also pretty small
until the introduction of guile, so we'll have to see.

        <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.
More information about the Python-list mailing list