One overlooked advantage for Lisp over Python is a better development environment, for me that means Slime for Lisp. For Python I have several years of experience with IDLE and the win32 Ide, and Slime is the winner. Press a key and the function you are editing is recompiled and loaded into memory. The crossreference and the object inspector is very nice. How about fuzzy-complete, I only have to write de-me and press tab, and I get define-method-combination. Slime coupled with the paredit structured editing mode, which lets you edit Lisp code as list structure rather than characters, is a dream.
Pythons advantages are: Faster startup-time which makes it a good scripting language. More platforms, there is no Common Lisp on Nokia phones. Some clever details, like using minus to index vectors from the right. (aref "hello" -1) gives an error on Lisp, but the character o on Python. Another detail I like is that you can choose how to quote strings, in Python you can write three double-quotes to start a string that can include anything, quotes, doublequotes and newlines. You can use double-quote if you want to embed single-quotes "john's" or single-quote if you want to embed double-quotes '<id="2">'. Talking about Lisps advantages will take me too long. /hankhero, a switcher. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
