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merits of Lisp vs Python

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.org.uk
Sun Dec 10 10:55:58 EST 2006 
mystilleef wrote:
> Rewriting the sun and moon, or needlessly reinvent the wheel
> was popular in the 70s, but it's boring and expensive today. Today,
> when a developer needs to solve a problem, the question they ask is,
> "Is there a library for that?". If the answer is no, they a more likely
> to switch to a language that provides a library that solves their
> problem.

Indeed. Software development is not a purely technical discipline:
combinations of issues such as the ability to reuse components, the
availability of such components, economics, project organisation, the
skills of participants, and so on, all start to weigh against the
benefits of being able to roll one's own elegant solutions over and
over again.

> The challenge for developers today is software architecture,
> robustness and scalability, not language purity or semantics. The Lisp,
> and to an extent Haskell, community will never ever ever grok this.

I'm not sure that you're correct about the Haskell community: there
appears to be a fair amount of relevant new work emerging from that
direction which may not only help Haskell developers to deal with the
harder problems of developing scalable and robust systems, but also
might affect the evolution of a number of other languages. However, I'd
agree that with the emergence of languages like Erlang, people want
solutions focused on particular systems engineering problems - it's all
very well arguably having the toolbox to create such solutions, but
most software developers just want to be handed the right tool.

> They'll continue to wonder why an "inferior" language like Python keeps
> getting popular. It will always escape them that it might be because
> Python is actually easier to use for most people to write "real world"
> applications. It has good usability.

And with regard to the remark about having access to libraries, it's
worth remembering that there's a lot of envy about things like CPAN -
an extensive collection of libraries for an even more "inferior"
language. When it is said that "CPAN is the language, Perl 6 is the
syntax", the remark should not be a surprise - it's a trend that was
observed at least twenty or thirty years ago, if not before.

Paul
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