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merits of Lisp vs Python

JShrager at gmail.com JShrager at gmail.com
Sun Dec 10 12:53:38 EST 2006 
Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Care to tell us what the startup was, and where it is now?

Sure. We were called Afferent, Inc. We did simulated organic chemistry,
robot planning and control, and semi-automatic products analysis for
combinatorial chemistry for drug discovery for the pharmaceutical
industry. Founded in, um, ~1996? we were acquired in, um, 1999? (sorry,
I'm a little fuzzy on the dates) by MDL, Inc. for ... well, I'm not
sure that I'm supposed to say how much, so I won't. If someone can find
it in the public record, please feel free to post it. Let's just say
that we weren't a Dot Com but we also weren't particularly unhappy
about the deal. :-)

BTW, I didn't mean to imply that only reason that we used Lisp was the
compiler. What we were doing was more-or-less AI, and we wouldn't have
even thought to try to use anything other than Lisp. (I won't say that
we couldn't have in theory done it in another compiled language for
fear of attack by the Turing Mafia! :-) What I meant was the we
certainly would not have even consider Python or any other uncompiled
language because it would have been WAY too slow! Our (delivered
executable!) product could do hundreds of thousands of simulated
chemical reactions and solve robot planning problems in seconds. (The
robot planning was actually pretty simple. The simulated chemistry was
decidedly NOT!) The Tk-based GUI was by far the slowest part of the
system!

I have the code here (probably not the latest bcs I left the company
when it was acquired), let's do a little experiment, for what it's
worth: 89727 lines of Lisp code in 131 modules (lisp code files), 3306
"(defun" (by grep|wc), and 261 "(defmacro". [We did NOT use
macros as functions!] [Note that lines of code doesn't really matter
in Lisp.]

If you are interested, you can read a little about our product in this
paper:


http://nostoc.stanford.edu/jeff/personal/vita/pubs/2001designforscience.pdf

as well as seeing a little of the interface. (If you have any interest
in history of science, EScience, or drug discovery, you might even find
the content of the paper interesting! :-)
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