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: "undergraduates 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, [email protected] http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
