[kgwgk]

Common lisp and a handful of other scheme/lisp variants, for example, if we talk about high-level general purpose languages.

Lush was a lispy open-source language - implemented in C - that deserved a better outcome.

And of course there were other scripting languages around like Perl, Tcl and Lua. Torch was built on top of the latter, by the way.

[323]

The consensus at the time was that one should only use Perl/Tcl for legacy reasons. And that these languages should be replaced with Python.

A few examples, there were countless articles like these:

2000 Eric Raymond (!) - Why Python?

> It was at this point I realized I was probably leaving Perl behind. ... For anything larger or more complex, I have come to prefer the subtle virtues of Python—and I think you will, too.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

2002 What's wrong with Perl:

https://www.garshol.priv.no/download/text/perl.html

[kgwgk]

To clarify, I was mentioning Perl/Tcl as existing alternatives that were "equally bad" as Python - not necessarily better. In any case, the fact that a teaching language like python ended being used for numerical computing - a task that it was not suited for - is accidental.

[zem]

lush was sadly dynamically scoped at a time the lisp universe in general had agreed lexical scope was the way to go. I feel like it could have gotten a lot more traction if it wasn't for that. (also if I remember correctly its desktop gui libraries were windows only)

[kgwgk]

I think it was the other way around: the GUI was based on X11.

http://lush.sourceforge.net/news.html

2003-02-19: Rejoice, rejoice! Thanks to Leon, the CVS version now compiles and runs on Windoze under Cygwin. Be sure to read the README.cygwin before installing. What works: the interpreter, the compiler, the dynamic loader, X11 graphics and events. What doesn't (yet) work: external packages such as GSL, SDL, OpenGL...