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

[Ian Bicking]

On Sun, 2002-11-10 at 09:27, Alex Martelli wrote:
> Surprise, surprise: the language that's always itself, always well designed, 
> is popular; the languages that anybody can change arbitrarily aren't.

I think you underestimate the ability to mess with Python.  You can make
weird things in Python by using the magic methods, things which act in
unexpected ways.  It *is* true that these aren't syntactic additions,
but Lisp doesn't have significant syntactic additions either -- macros
change the semantics, but the ()'s are still there and are always parsed
the same way.  The semantics of execution just get messed with.

It may be true that Lisp fails to respond to users needs because macros
are a good excuse.  Prefix notation may not be good, but many people
have noted that you can use a macro to get infix notation -- which isn't
a real solution.  It's saying you can solve it yourself, in your code,
but Lisp the language isn't going to be compromised for aesthetic
reasons.  Lisp lacks any conventional syntactic sugar, and you shouldn't
depend on extensions to make the core language sweet.  But I wouldn't
actually blame Lisp's popularity on that.

Anyway, Python is not a clear contrast to Lisp's flexibility.  Pascal is
a good contrast, and Pascal *truly* sucks.  Python's language tricks
happen at a higher level, but they are still language tricks.

--
Ian Bicking           Colorstudy Web Development
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