[sadfsa]

Ease of programming isn't the issue, at least not when it comes to writing libraries that must interface with C code (as a robot-interfacing library is likely to). Most Schemes and Lisps can interface to C by means of a few simple declarations, while Python requires the C code to accept and return Python's internal data structures (and convert them to a form that can be used by C code), and requires it to register those functions that are to be made visible to Python.

Scheme (PLT)

  (require scheme/foreign)
  (unsafe!)
  (define my-c-lib (ffi-lib "libmylib")) ;; loads libmylib.so
  (define my-c-func (get-ffi-obj 'my_c_func my-c-lib (_fun _long -> _long)))
  ;; The C code does not need to take Scheme into account--
  ;; Existing C libraries can be interfaced with Scheme
  ;; with a trivial amount of effort.

C (to be linked against Python code-- Python can load the resulting shared library as if it was written in Python). Notice that all this code does is interface Linux's htonl function to Python:

  #include <Python.h>
  #include <netinet/in.h>
    
  static PyObject *
  py_htonl(PyObject *self, PyObject *args) {
     long my_arg;
 
     if(!PyArgParseTuple(args, "l", &my_arg))
         return NULL;
     return PyBuildValue("l", htonl(my_arg));
  }
  
  static PyMethodDef methods[] = {
      {"htonl", py_htonl, METH_VARARGS,
       "Demonstrate Python's C interface\n"}
  };
  
  static char module_doc[] = "Demonstration";  
  
  PyMODINIT_FUNC
  initfunc(void) {
    PyInitModule3("mylib", methods, module_doc);
  }