> In my mind, Python has all the pedagogical advantages of Lisp, plus enough syntactic cues to prevent getting "lost in a sea of parentheses". (Of course, it lacks plenty of other nice Lisp-family features.)
> Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net.
Basically, that it's better pedagogically because it looks like pseudo-code and it's easy to get up and running quickly.
Which is valid, but frustrating to see it lead to actual adoption outside of pedagogy. That property is entirely orthogonal to, almost at odds with, what makes a good programming language for medium to large production quality applications.
If we used that logic elsewhere in life we’d all be playing the flute and cycling around on tricycles and balance bikes. But for some reason in tech it’s all about Hello World.
The story of the winner being scrapy market entrants that are lower-cost (...of learning, in the case of python) and good-enough-quality (...than OCaml, Lisps, Haskel, definitely not JS or Java) is not a new one. I don't subscribe to your analogies.
What you say here reminds me of something Peter Norvig said 15 years ago on this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815
> Peter Norvig here. I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net.
Basically, that it's better pedagogically because it looks like pseudo-code and it's easy to get up and running quickly.