Python is far from a top performer according to benchmark test...

[Michele Simionato]

aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote in message news:<btvsvl$pu7$1 at panix3.panix.com>...
> In article <bttu62$gdh$1 at newstree.wise.edt.ericsson.se>,
> Frithiof Andreas Jensen <frithiof.jensen at removethis.ted.ericsson.dk> wrote:
> >
> >That, in my opinion, is wrong: Fortran is successful because it was there
> >first!
> 
> Which brings up the obvious question: why isn't Lisp successful?

But it is successful! Look at people working on AI, theory of programming
languages, etc: they will (presumably) know Lisp. OTOH, look at people
working on number crunching: they will (presumably) know Fortran.
It turns out that the number of people working on numerical analysis (or 
using numerical tools) is much larger than the number of people working on 
abstract things, so you will have more people knowing Fortran than people 
knowing Lisp. But this fact alone does not mean that one language is more
successfull than the other in its application niche. You could compare
Python and Perl (or Ruby) and say that one is more successful than
the other, but Lisp and Fortran have different audiences and you cannot 
estimate their success just as number of users.

Just my 2 eurocents,

        Michele