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I'd argue that Graham's comment about succinctness being power is correct, but him saying Lisp is more powerful than Python is too much of a blanket statement.

Furthermore, ecosystems are more important than the language itself. If Python has an easier onboarding experience and it is easy to read others code, and the community is friendly and active...after some time, it becomes a 1-stop shop for everything. A lot of things I do have a library for Python and nothing for Common Lisp. Sure lisp is waaay better for writing a compiler (I would assume) and has more power on the upper end of the spectrum, but I think Python has a lot more power in the low to medium part of the spectrum where you have a lot of simple scripting/data science/CRUD apps.




If there are good off-the-shelf solutions to most of your problems, you can't differentiate from your competitors by using them. You want a problem space that requires writing a lot of novel code when your advantage is in writing better code.


You just assumed that everyone builds competitive software. A lot of folks need to write code for scripting or to analyze data.. whatever. I don't care if anyone else can do it just as fast. Also, I can't imagine someone writing something from scratch in Common Lisp faster than I can slap some components together, solve a problem, and move on.

With that in mind, I'm a huge proponent of doing everything yourself IF you have the time. This is the Forth philosophy that allows you to eliminate gobs of garbage code, reduce bugs, and maintain the code better long term.




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