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by stan_rogers 2511 days ago
Sort of. It's more a case of having all of the flexibility of a Lisp - the ability to program with wishful thinking and fill in the details later - and all of the "batteries included" of Python.

It would genuinely be worth your while to watch the SICP lectures with Gerry Sussman and Hal Abelson [1] to get an inkling of an idea of what "your program is just more data" can mean. Lisp is more about brining the language up to the level of the problem than bringing the problem down to the level of the language, and it's difficult to appreciate what that means until you've seen it. By the time you get to the end of lecture 3B, it should click.

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

2 comments

There's also the Common Lisp package "burgled batteries"[1] which allows you to call Python from Lisp. Unfortunately, the original author no longer maintains it and it hasn't been updated to Python 3.

[1] https://github.com/pinterface/burgled-batteries

There is a fork that supports Python 3:

https://github.com/snmsts/burgled-batteries3

Thanks - appreciate that and I'll double check the link.

Because I'm still a bit confused at what Lisp is!

>Because I'm still a bit confused at what Lisp is!

You're in for a treat!

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html