What does Python fix?

[Courageous]

François Pinard wrote:

>>  [re: paucity of commerical Lisp stuff]

> No, I did not know.  I'm not close to commercial software.  When I work in
> Scheme, I use Gambit, which is free enough despite commercial.

Scheme is really minimalist when compared to ANSI Common Lisp.
Scheme is to Lisp about the same way K&R C is to ANSI-C++. Which
is to say, in both cases, the standards committee threw in the
kitchen sink and it crashed with a predictable bang. 

One of the things which both C++ and Common Lisp have in common
is that there are so many forms and constructs for achieving the
same thing that it's actually possible (nay, likely!) for
programmers working in the field to have their own unique set
of preferred forms which they tend to favor, effectively meaning
that each programmer has their own _dialect_ of the language,
and may not even fully understand the dialect in use by other
programmers using the language. That's simply abhorrent.

Witness the mass defections from C++ to Java, which I firmly
believe happened at least in part because the representational
weight of the language outgrew the tolerance of large sections
of the coding community.

Lisp is worse. The Lisp community is like a ghost town, with
the occasional banshee howl echoing darkly around the chamber
in lament of what might have been.

C//

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