merits of Lisp vs Python

[David Golden]

Paul Rubin wrote:
 
> Forth was always unreadable to me but I never did much.  I thought its
> aficionados were silly.  Yes if you have a complicated math expression
> in Lisp, you have to sit there for a moment rearranging it in infix in
> your mind to figure out what it says.  The point is that such
> expressions aren't all that common in typical Lisp code.
> 


I find Lisp, Forth and classic funny-symbol APL relatively readable
(well, once you've learned the funny symbols in the APL case) That
spans prefix/postfix/infix... The commonality is simple evaluation
order, no damn precedence rules.  I can _cope_ with precedence rules,
I'm not a moron, but I prefer languages that don't make heavy use of
them. Well, more accurately, sources that don't, but most coders in
communities of languages-with-lots-of-precedence-rules consider
reliance on those precedence rules in source code idiomatic.  And
precedence rules, once you get beyond a few (sometimes rather
misleading) similarities to the ones that most people are made to learn
early on for arithmetic notation, can vary a lot from computer language
to computer language.