Re:Lisp as a Vehicle for Rapid Prototyping (1997)
by ken on Friday August 30, 2019 @08:17PM
(#20843884)
Which part relevant to this article has changed? Python/Ruby still don't have a condition system. They don't have macros. Python added optional declarations recently but the compiler doesn't use them for optimization (or anything else). Generic functions are available as an add-on library, but aren't terribly well integrated. They both have separate debuggers which don't use their own language for debugging.
Python/Ruby do have dynamic redefinition and higher-order functions and a couple other nifty features, but most of the features I see on this page are still unique to Lisp.
Re:Lisp as a Vehicle for Rapid Prototyping (1997)
by aidenn0 on Saturday August 31, 2019 @05:10PM
(#20848803)
- It is comprehensive.
- It supports modular design.
- It supports interactive development, debugging, and update.
These things are true of Ruby and Python in a way that they are not for C, C++, or to a lesser extent TCL.
The tooling around lisp is still a distinguishing factor though. I haven't found a free development environment for python that has even a small fraction of the power of SLIME (I don't use python quite enough to investigate commercial offerings, though the one time I used pycharm it was fairly nice, it didn't feel as dynamic as SLIME), and it still has a fairly strong edge against most dynamic languages in terms of optimizing compilers. For some reason, outside of smalltalk/lisp, AOT compilation never caught on with dynamic languages, where you see either an interpreter or a JIT.