I guess if you can't bring pythonistas to lisp, you can go out and meet them. Certainly, this is a great example how to prove to the uninformed that lisp is relevant in the modern world.
While this is a neat project, what does Python gain by being hosted in the Common Lisp interpreter? Is there an extensive library as is available for languages hosted in the JVM or the Microsoft CLR?
In addition to potential performance benefits, it's an interesting platform for potential optimizations and language extensions. Lisp is really a great language for writing parsers, and so it's great for extending python.
It also allows Common Lisp to use Python Libraries and Python to use Lisp Libraries. If you're on Allegro Common Lisp, this means you may have easy CORBA support, as an example.
For one thing I'd be interested to see if Python runs any faster when it's hosted in Common Lisp, since it will presumably reap the benefits of a native compiler that produces machine-code instead of byte-code.
This is essentially what the PyPy (Python-in-Python) effort is betting on, except that by building the system in restricted Python, they're also hoping the system can also optimize itself to higher levels of performance. It will be interesting to see how the results of Python-on-Python compare to Python-on-Lisp.
I guess if you can't bring pythonistas to lisp, you can go out and meet them. Certainly, this is a great example how to prove to the uninformed that lisp is relevant in the modern world.
Who cares about the uninformed? They don't write libraries or participate in the community, so their existence is irrelevant.
Argh, would love to try this out, but it apparently it doesn't compile on SBCL or CMUCL yet. Still, definitely won't get properly useful until more or less the whole standard library is supported.
This will be really cool if it carries on a gets to completion.
