Choosing a programming language as a competitive tool

[Courageous]

On 07 May 2001 04:32:27 -0400, Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> wrote:

>Michael Hudson <mwh at python.net> writes:
>
>> I think many of the apparent similarities of Lisp (most any dialect)
>> and Python could be explained by the fact that they are both
>> dynamic, interactive languages, and once you're doing that, there's
>> likely to be a certain amount of convergent evolution.
>
>There's nothing "convergent" about it.  Lisp was invented in the late
>1950's, and Python was invented 30 years later.  The reason that
>Python is very similar to Lisp in a lot of ways is because many of the
>the ideas come from Lisp.  If not directly, then via Smalltalk, or any
>of the multitude of other programming languages that Lisp has had a
>profound effect upon.

This may or may not be the case, but really isn't relevant. It could be,
for example, that all land animals above a certain size are vertebrates
with four limbs because of some convergent solution in the problem
space, or it could be because of common ancestry. Doesn't really
matter, however.

C//