Benefits of moving from Python to Common Lisp?

[Andrew Dalke]

Michael Hudson:
>But they very much take their lead from CPython, so Tim's points all
>remain valid.  Well, except for vyper, but that doesn't have enough
>influence to count (perhaps unfortunately).

I recall some of the conversation when (then) JPython was being
developed, on making sure the documentation didn't require
implementation-specific functionality.  So there is *some*
standard-like documentation.

What's needed to call something a standard?

I don't know of a C++ compiler which fully meets the C++ standard.
(They all seem to have bits of 'oh, we don't do that yet'.)

So I figured three different implementations (C, Java and OCaml)
with no shared run-time environment was enough to disprove Tim's
statement:

] there is only one implementation, and the language
] is defined implicitly by that implementation

For Python, would it be better to say

  there are several implementations, and the language is mostly
  defined by the documentation, but the other implementations
  defer to the C implementation, distribution, and developers in
  matters of interpretation.
?

Tim's point was that standardizing a library is a complicated and
expensive process.  My point is that the Python library
(standardized or not) works with quite different runtimes.  Why
aren't there similarly widely used though non-standard libraries
for CL for "doing stuff like internet programming"?  [Paul Rubin]

For example, back in the Perl4 days when CGI programming first
became hot, just about everyone used cgi-lib.pl even though it
wasn't part of the standard Perl library, and this was pre-CPAN.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com