I had a colleague who was hostile to any language other than common lisp. Except python, which I assume is just because this page exists. What if norvig woke up that day and decided to write about Ruby instead?
Which incidentely has a much better history with JIT adoption than Python, where the community has largely ignored PyPy.
Meanwhile Ruby has had MacRuby from Apple, later canceled, but the main developers went out creating RubyMotion.
Sun toyed with JRuby, it was even officially supported on Netbeans, then Red-Hat supported the project for a while. It was also one of the first dynamic languages on GraalVM, with TruffleRuby. GraalPy effort only came a couple of years later, and is still on baby steps.
As of 2025, the refernce implementation counts with YJIT, MJIT, TenderJIT, and MRuby 4 brings ZJIT to the party.
Exchanging Lisp for Python we went backwards in regards to performance in dynamic languages, in a distopian world where C, C++, Fortran libraries are "Python" libraries.
Nope they are bindings, and any language with FFI can have bindings to those same libraries, e.g. PyTorch can also be used in straight C++, or from Java.
I usually do REPL driven development in Python via emacs but you can tell it's not the natural way to do things, esp. if you start doing stuff with async. But I still feel that it makes me way more productive than I would otherwise be
It has a Tk based REPL and debugger in the box, and I guess nowadays Jupiter notebooks is the closest to a Lisp Machines/Interlisp-D kind of development.
There are the IDE integrations as well.
Pity is the lack of (compile ...) and (decompile ....), or similar.
There is a good compromise with reflection, attributes, metaclasses, one line lambdas, comprehensions
Now the lack of machine code generation for something Lisp was doing in the 1960's, Smalltalk in the 1980's, SELF in 1990's, and having to fall back on C, C++ and Fortran is bonkers.
Thankfully this is finally becoming a priority for those willing to sponsor the effort, and kudos to those making it happen.
I would rather use Common Lisp, in something like Allegro, but I will hardly find such a job, thus only arguing about language features doesn't take us that far.
Worth mentioning that this is the documentation of 3.15 alpha 3. I feel like we’re better waiting for a release candidate or the final version before posting this page, in case there are any changes. Most people reading this are going to assume it’s final.
In the improved error message [0] how are they able to tell nested attributes without having a big impact in performance? Or maybe this has a big impact on performance, then using exceptions for control flow is deprecated?
...
print(container.area)
> AttributeError: 'Container' object has no attribute 'area'. Did you mean: 'inner.area'?
> using exceptions for control flow is deprecated?
Exceptions are for the exceptional cases - the ones that mean normal operations are being suspended and error messages are being generated. Don't use them for control flow.
In Python, an iterator raises a StopIteration exception to indicate to the for loop that the iterator is done iterating.
In Python, the VM raises a KeyboardInterrupt exception when the user hits ctrl+c in order to unwind the stack, run cleanup code and eventually exit the program.
Python is a quite heavy user of exceptions for control flow.
Typically yes, but not in Python. In Python it is quite common and accepted, and sometimes even recommended as Pythonic to use exceptions for control flow. See iterators, for example.
Using exceptions for flow control has always been a bad idea, despite what they might have said. Perhaps they are generating that message lazily though?
On the other hand it's not like Python really cares about performance....
All iterators in Python use exceptions for flow control, as do all context managers for the abort/rollback case, and it is generally considered Pythonic to use single-indexing (EAFP) instead of check-then-get (LBYL) - generally with indexing and KeyError though and less commonly with attribute access and AttributeError.
[heavy green check mark]
try:
data = collection['key']
except KeyError:
data = ..try something else..
[red x]
if 'key' in collection:
data = collection['key']
else:
data = ..try something else..
The latter form also has the genuine disadvantage that nothing ensures the two keys are the same. I've seen typos there somewhat often in code reviews.
The new profiling.sampling module looks very neat, but I don't see any way to enable/disable the profiler from code. This greatly limits the usefulness, as I am often in control of the code itself but not how it is launched.
encode()/decode() have used UTF-8 as the default since Python 3.2 (soon, 15 years ago). This is about the default encoding for e.g. the "encoding" parameter of open().
You mean the coding= comment? Where are you shipping your code that that was actually a problem? I've never been on a project where we did that, let alone needed it.
> On POSIX platforms, platlib directories will be created if needed when creating virtual environments, instead of using lib64 -> lib symlink. This means purelib and platlib of virtual environments no longer share the same lib directory on platforms where sys.platlibdir is not equal to lib.
Sigh. Why can't they just be the same in virtual environments. Who cares about lib64 in a venv? Just another useless search path.
Readit News
-- https://www.norvig.com/python-lisp.html
Meanwhile Ruby has had MacRuby from Apple, later canceled, but the main developers went out creating RubyMotion.
Sun toyed with JRuby, it was even officially supported on Netbeans, then Red-Hat supported the project for a while. It was also one of the first dynamic languages on GraalVM, with TruffleRuby. GraalPy effort only came a couple of years later, and is still on baby steps.
As of 2025, the refernce implementation counts with YJIT, MJIT, TenderJIT, and MRuby 4 brings ZJIT to the party.
Exchanging Lisp for Python we went backwards in regards to performance in dynamic languages, in a distopian world where C, C++, Fortran libraries are "Python" libraries.
Nope they are bindings, and any language with FFI can have bindings to those same libraries, e.g. PyTorch can also be used in straight C++, or from Java.
There are the IDE integrations as well.
Pity is the lack of (compile ...) and (decompile ....), or similar.
Which by the way is available in Julia.
Parantheses in Lisp are visible, whitespaces in Python, not really.
...Right.
Now the lack of machine code generation for something Lisp was doing in the 1960's, Smalltalk in the 1980's, SELF in 1990's, and having to fall back on C, C++ and Fortran is bonkers.
Thankfully this is finally becoming a priority for those willing to sponsor the effort, and kudos to those making it happen.
I would rather use Common Lisp, in something like Allegro, but I will hardly find such a job, thus only arguing about language features doesn't take us that far.
https://peps.python.org/pep-0686/
[0] -- https://docs.python.org/3.15/whatsnew/3.15.html#improved-err...
Search is limited to 20 attributes and non-descriptors only to avoid arbitrary code execution.
I assume constructing AttributeErrors isn't highly performance sensitive.
In Python, the VM raises a KeyboardInterrupt exception when the user hits ctrl+c in order to unwind the stack, run cleanup code and eventually exit the program.
Python is a quite heavy user of exceptions for control flow.
I really dislike this too, but that’s how it is.
On the other hand it's not like Python really cares about performance....
[heavy green check mark]
[red x] The latter form also has the genuine disadvantage that nothing ensures the two keys are the same. I've seen typos there somewhat often in code reviews.Nice, not specifying the encoding is one of the most common issues I need to point out in code reviews.
Sigh. Why can't they just be the same in virtual environments. Who cares about lib64 in a venv? Just another useless search path.