newLISP is being discussed on Eric Raymond's blog as the "batteries included version of LISP". Eric has said he uses Python because he hasn't found any "batteries included" versions of LISP. Perhaps some people here may want to head over and add their comments.
//http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5211#comments
Eric Raymond was co-inventor of the term "Open Source", and author of The Art of Unix Programming, and The Hacker's Dictionary.
This Jeff Read on the thread gives us a hard time. Unfortunately, it's not the right place for a discussion about newLisp.
It seems to me he makes some valid points, but what he misses is that it's all about compromises. Yes, ORO and other features of newLisp bring some limitations, but also carry some advantages like extraordinary small footprint (on par with Lua, except that Lua without extensions is almost useless because it is meant to be an embedded language), and fast execution (for a tree-walking interpreter, a technique that usually loses to bytcode interpreters).
I just read the thread. (It's a long one and I wanted to read all the other comments on the main topic.)
Great job, Ted and Lutz! I noticed that Jeff Read just continued his smug, condescending tone throughout the thread, right into the newLISP part. He's one of those guys that you don't ever want to have on your dev team, because of his ignorant presumptuousness and overall shabby behavior to colleagues. Interestingly, I noticed that esr in his comment was very even-tempered, complimentary, and curious about an aspect or two of newLISP. Clearly, unlike Read, he bothered to learn about it.
Before commenting further on Eric Raymond's blog, it would be useful if everyone read this article by Eric Raymond, where he explains why he switched from Perl to Python. The article was written in 2000.
Why Python?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882
I'll have to read the thread, coming back to newlisp after a few years. However, it has replace my frequent use of ruby.
Welcome back!