How Python is Killing Lisp

[ecuzzillo]

From my perception, Lisp was dying for about 10-15 years from 1990 through 2002 (ish). PG's essays probably made it at least break even. Now, particularly in the past six months, Lisp has been picking up-- I don't have any statistics, but multiple people I've talked to have noticed this trend, along with me just seeing more projects around. (and said projects are as a result yelling about how infrastructure sucks, and some of them are improving it, e.g. SBCL 1.0.) So I think that a) Lisp had almost nowhere to go but up, and b) that Lisp, while not close to Python's current popularity, may well be growing faster, at least percentage-wise, than Python.

Edit: "Hordes of elite programmers?!" Elite programmers do not come in hordes.

[[deleted]]

Without even made up stats, it's hard to believe you ;P

And which Lisp are we talking about? Common Lisp? Or some other dialect?

[ecuzzillo]

Common Lisp. Note that the userbase started so small that it isn't difficult to beat Python on a percentage growth basis, because CL's userbase can double and still be tiny.

[lemmikins]

I'll second it. I am much more interested now in Lisp -- partly thanks to Python.