Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

[Anton Vredegoor]

On 8 Nov 2002 04:54:01 -0800, oleg_inconnu at myrealbox.com (Oleg) wrote:

>I don't know much about Python, but I looked at this comparison
>between Python and Common Lisp (
>http://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html ), and I couldn't help but
>wonder why Python is popular, while Common Lisp and Scheme aren't?

A computer program has to determine what a certain input means before
it can produce output.

In the years when Lisp was becoming popular the first task -
interpreting input - was considered to be hard and the other task -
producing output - was considered to be easy. People *expected* source
code to be difficult to read for humans. 

Nowadays some people think that interpreting a given message is
trivial compared to the problem of producing the right output. If the
computer has to decide that we must have meant something else in order
to be able to produce the right output: So be it.

As a consequence we can use a more human like language to communicate
with the computer.

Anton.

42