merits of Lisp vs Python

[Mark Tarver]

How do you compare Python to Lisp? What specific advantages do you
think that one has over the other?

Note I'm not a Python person and I have no axes to grind here. This is
just a question for my general education.

Mark

[Björn Lindström]

"mystilleef " <my********@gma il.com>:

Better OO? You mean the one that doesn't support basic encapsulation
and is retardedly cumbersome to use?

Encapsulation isn't so much a property of the language as of your data
types.

There's a reason I said, I'd never use Lisp for OO not even when I'm
high. Gimme Python, Eiffel or Smalltalk anyday, not the retarded
add-on package bolted on CL.

Python also lacks encapsulation, in the sense you probably mean.

--
Björn Lindström <bk**@stp.lingf il.uu.se>
Student of computational linguistics, Uppsala University, Sweden

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 14:21:17 +0000, Kirk Sluder wrote:

In article
<pa************ *************** *@REMOVE.THIS.c ybersource.com. au>,
Steven D'Aprano <st***@REMOVE.T HIS.cybersource .com.auwrote:

>Yes. But you can't redefine 1+2 in Python, at least not without hacking
the interpreter. Can you redefine (+ 1 2) in Lisp?

Not without barreling through error messages about name conflicts.

Ah, nice to get a straight answer to a question for a change, and without
an insult or a misrepresentati on in sight. Thank you.

--
Steven

[Ken Tilton]

Paul Rubin wrote:

Ken Tilton <ke*******@gmai l.comwrites:

>>Have you read On Lisp by Paul Graham? It is on-line. Just the preface
will do, I think, maybe also Chapter One where he raves on macros. Do
you think he is mistaken? Confused? Lying? Mutant?

I remember Paul Graham's piece about macros that made him sound like
someone who went nuts with them, as is certainly possible to do.

But you could have just flipped thru the rest of the pages to see if he
/had/ gone nuts with them!

In
my experience, good coders write for clarity and that includes in
their use of Lisp macros. All in all Lisp's macro system is something
like the C preprocessor. Yes, you can obfuscate things horribly with
it, but you can also use it to make things clearer, and that's what
good programmers do.

One has to be from the US and of a certain age to remember this, but
this old line from a commercial for high-octane gasoline says it for me:
power to be used, not abused.

ken

--
Algebra: http://www.tilton-technology.com/LispNycAlgebra1.htm

"Well, I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five
years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally
won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd

"I'll say I'm losing my grip, and it feels terrific."
-- Smiling husband to scowling wife, New Yorker cartoon

[mystilleef]

Björn Lindström wrote:

Encapsulation isn't so much a property of the language as of your data
types.

"Modern" and well designed object oriented languages provide sane
mechanisms for encapsulation, at least when implementing new types.

Python also lacks encapsulation, in the sense you probably mean.

That's news to me. How so?

[Paul Boddie]

mystilleef wrote:

Rewriting the sun and moon, or needlessly reinvent the wheel
was popular in the 70s, but it's boring and expensive today. Today,
when a developer needs to solve a problem, the question they ask is,
"Is there a library for that?". If the answer is no, they a more likely
to switch to a language that provides a library that solves their
problem.

Indeed. Software development is not a purely technical discipline:
combinations of issues such as the ability to reuse components, the
availability of such components, economics, project organisation, the
skills of participants, and so on, all start to weigh against the
benefits of being able to roll one's own elegant solutions over and
over again.

The challenge for developers today is software architecture,
robustness and scalability, not language purity or semantics. The Lisp,
and to an extent Haskell, community will never ever ever grok this.

I'm not sure that you're correct about the Haskell community: there
appears to be a fair amount of relevant new work emerging from that
direction which may not only help Haskell developers to deal with the
harder problems of developing scalable and robust systems, but also
might affect the evolution of a number of other languages. However, I'd
agree that with the emergence of languages like Erlang, people want
solutions focused on particular systems engineering problems - it's all
very well arguably having the toolbox to create such solutions, but
most software developers just want to be handed the right tool.

They'll continue to wonder why an "inferior" language like Python keeps
getting popular. It will always escape them that it might be because
Python is actually easier to use for most people to write "real world"
applications. It has good usability.

And with regard to the remark about having access to libraries, it's
worth remembering that there's a lot of envy about things like CPAN -
an extensive collection of libraries for an even more "inferior"
language. When it is said that "CPAN is the language, Perl 6 is the
syntax", the remark should not be a surprise - it's a trend that was
observed at least twenty or thirty years ago, if not before.

Paul

[Ken Tilton]

mystilleef wrote:

Ken Tilton wrote:

>>Lisp has all the cool qualities you like in your pets, plus native
compilation in most implementations , plus maturity and a standard, plus
a better OO, plus macros, plus a dozen more small wins. Including
automatic indentation. :)

Better OO? You mean the one that doesn't support basic encapsulation
and is retardedly cumbersome to use? There's a reason I said, I'd never
use Lisp for OO not even when I'm high. Gimme Python, Eiffel or
Smalltalk anyday, not the retarded add-on package bolted on CL.

>>It is just a matter of critical mass. At some very low threshold Lisp
becomes "OK". I get the feeling that has already begun, but it is not
quite there yet. Certainly it gets mentioned now when language names get
bandied about, if only to be dismissed. That is a step up for us. :)

Bahahahaha! You lispers and your fairy little macros world.

I admire your knack for self-refuting discourse.

ken

--
Algebra: http://www.tilton-technology.com/LispNycAlgebra1.htm

"Well, I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five
years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally
won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd

"I'll say I'm losing my grip, and it feels terrific."
-- Smiling husband to scowling wife, New Yorker cartoon

[Jesús Carrete Montaña]

Fast. Very fast!

>
- Paddy.

Well, Python certainly is faster than most people doing floating-point
arithmetic by hand, but I don't think this is the correct argument to use
against Lisp :-P.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 15:05:04 +0100, Stefan Nobis wrote:

Steven D'Aprano <st***@REMOVE.T HIS.cybersource .com.auwrites:

>Look at us: we're all communicating in a common language, English,
and we all agree on syntax and grammar. Now, I could be a lot more
expressive, and language could be a lot more powerful, if I could
define my own language where "You are a poopy-head" was in fact a
detailed and devastatingly accurate and complete explanation for why
Python was a better language than Lisp.

>So it is good that English restricts the expressiveness and power of
the syntax and grammar. While we're talking English, we can both
understand each other, and in fact people who redefine words and
ignore the common meaning of them are often covering weaknesses in
their arguments.

Uh, you don't talk often to non-programmers, do you?

Oh, if you only knew!

Talk a bit to
non-programmers about your programming habits, why you prefer which
programming language and so on. Everything in english. How much do
they understand?

That depends on how much jargon I use. Jargon, I should point out, is not
necessarily a pejorative term. It can just mean vocabulary used
only in a specialist field, and as such, jargon is very, very important.

Ever talked to skateboarders? Other people of different scenes? They
are creating new, specialized languages every day.

Yes, that's right. And if they insist on using their specialist language
where "that's bad" means "that is best quality", and I insist on using
my language where "that's bad" means "that is worst quality", how much
successful communication are we going to have?

Here in Germany a
study was published a little time ago, how few people understand
commercials and their slogans.

Which just proves my point. If people don't share the same language
constructs, the same words, the same grammar, etc, they can't understand
each other.

Do you know how many jokes work? Yes, by misunderstandin gs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour

--
Steven.

[Paul Boddie]

hit_the_lights wrote:

>

[import side-effects]

Somehow the meaning of "import" changed between the first
and the second line. Doesn't it frighten you?
(BTW: Do you know how that works, or should a Lisper show
you?)

Given that the meaning of import doesn't need to have changed to bring
out the described consequences, I guess anyone wanting to know more
won't be asking you specifically.

It seems that Phytonistas, including Guido, don't trust each
other. Guido always provides half assed restrictive solutions
instead of decent meta programming. Examples include "lambda",
the new "with" syntax and decorators.

Actually there are people in the Python community who don't really
approve of stuff like "with", the removal of "lambda" and the lack of
macros, "programmab le syntax", and so on. But that's probably not
apparent to those who paint every picture with broad strokes.

Paul

[philip.armitage]

On Dec 10, 12:28 am, a...@pythoncraf t.com (Aahz) wrote:

>And that is why I will never write Lisp. I loathe Emacs.

Me too. So if that's what's stopping you then you might be interested
to hear that when I moved my free time programming from Python to Lisp
it took only a weekend to learn enough of the language to code up a
little Lisp editor. It's funny that I was able to do this given what
I've now learned from this thread:

- Lisp is only used for research (but I'm not an academic)
- Lisp is hard to learn (because of all those parenthesis)
- There's no practical libraries available (so how did I do it so
fast?)

Phil