Python Envy

GaryKing asks:

I’ve been looking at Ruby quite recently while working on Montezuma with John Wiseman on a port of Ferret (which is a ruby port of the java Lucene text indexing engine). I don’t see anything particularly special about Ruby; overall, it seems like another reinvention of the wheel with more syntax with which to be confused! That said, all these “scripting plus” languages do fit a niche that Lisp has not been able to play in because Lisp has too much baggage (in my holy opinion) and because Lisp qua Lisp is missing the batteries like sockets, web services, etc…

What I find most interesting, however, is the social phenomenon: why and how did Ruby and Python make it to the big time?

I thought the Reddit guys already answered the question.

• Lisp the language may be nice, but Lisp the implementations (plural!) stuff people right up. Python matured very quickly because it’s free; it’s library rivals those of any commercial Lisp implementation; and runs on Windows.
• In addition, Lisp relies so much on Emacs to handle indentation properly, so that code remains readable, while python tinkerers could cope with plain-old-notepad.
• Emacs has a learning curve of its own. Most people prefer to learn one thing at a time. Definitely not Lisp and Emacs at the same time.
• Unfortunately for Lisp, Emacs is so firmly wedded to open-source Lisp implementations that it acts as a real barrier to tinkerers.
• Lispers who don’t know python should just take a look at the python debugging screencast on this site, and see how easy Python is to debug off the command-line compared to Lisp. Look ma, no IDE!