Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Grzegorz Chrupala]

Rene van Bevern <rvb at rvb.dyndns.org> wrote in message news:<slrnbnr2pu.1qe.rvb at negoyl.vb-network>...
 
> I know at least one more person who came to LISP/Scheme over ruby. Maybe
> it needs ruby and python to enlighten people without confusing them with
> a syntax they are not used to first. ;)

I can't remember how *exactly* I came to use scheme (unfortuantely I
don't keep a diary), but trying to reconstruct it looks something like
this:

I am actually not a programmer, but mostly a linguist. About four 
years ago I got interested in computational linguistics and decided to
learn a programming language. The first programming book I picked up
was "The Gentle Introduction..." (Common Lisp). I made sense to me but
I couldn't find a plug'n' play lisp implementation (I was pretty
computer-illiterate at the time: could only manage v. basic stuff on
Windoze). So I put that aside and decided to have a go at Perl (widely
used in NLP). That was much easier, I installed the ActiveState win32
port no problems and picked Perl up from  online tutorials and the
multitude of other easily accessible Perl resources. After I've played
with perl for a while I heard about Python and Ruby, which to me
looked like more sophisticated versions of Perl, and I switched to
Ruby for most of my toy and not-so-toy scripts. While reading
ruby-talk and other ruby-stuff I kept coming across references to
Scheme and Lisp, which I was already vaguely familiar with from my
perusal of the "Gentle Introduction". At this point I was already
using Linux and so could easily install Clisp and half a dozen Scheme
implementations. Schemes such as Gauche, Bigloo and PLT seemed like
they were better suited to writing the sort of small programs or CGI
scripts that I was using Perl and Ruby for, so I sort of settled for
Scheme. (Sometime during this time I also learned Prolog in a
university course and it made me aware of the various advantages, as
well as some disadvantages, of using a very high level languages in
comp-ling).
At the moment I am quite happy with Scheme although I do miss the
large lively communities and the amout of libraries associated with
Perl, Python and Ruby. I hope the "revival" of Lisp-like languages
some of you have observed will gain momentum and that CL anb Scheme
will catch up with Python and Ruby in the areas where they are behind.

Cheers,
--
Grzegorz