merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> writes:
> May you have tried the wrong Lisp dialects so far:
> 
> (loop for i from 2 to 10 by 2
>        do (print i))

The loop language is so complicated and confusing that I never
bothered trying to learn it.  I always used simpler primitives to
write loops and it was always enough.

> This is Common Lisp. (Many Lisp and Scheme tutorials teach you that
> you should implement this using recursion, but you really don't have
> to. ;)

You can't really use that much recursion in Lisp because of the lack
of guaranteed TCO.  I think that makes it reasonable to say that
Scheme is a functional language but Lisp is not.  ("Functional" = it's
reasonable to code in a style where the only way to connect variables
to values is lambda binding (maybe through syntax sugar), so all loops
are implemented with recursion).