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

[Terry Hancock]

Hi Alex,
On Thursday 21 November 2002 09:57 am,  Alex Martelli wrote:
> [...]  Macros let people add warts to a language: good language designers
> are few and far between, but macros make everybody into a language
> designer, and not all people understand or acknowledge their limitations
> in this regard [...]
> 
> [...]  With Python (as with most other languages), the
> language is bedrock: you're stuck with however it was designed. 
> [...] we can take the language itself for
> granted and spend all of our time and energy on higher-level issues.

You've never read the Zope source code, have you? ;-D

Ow! The pain!  Zope manages to shake the foundations pretty
heavily -- implementing acquisition by overloading __getattr__ and
so forth. It *is* possible to warp Python pretty intensely if you have
a mind to.  I spend quite a bit of time reading and re-reading the
Zope sources to figure out how stuff is supposed to work and I'm still 
spinning around.  I think the real problem is a lack of well-defined APIs for 
product developers (the through-the-web API is pretty solid, though).

I think they're actually trying to simplify some of that with
Zope 3, which has to be a good thing, for the reasons you state.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com