Python vs JavaScript vs Common Lisp | What are the differences?

Overview

Python

Stacks250.8K

Followers205.3K

Votes6.9K

GitHub Stars69.7K

Forks33.3K

JavaScript

Stacks372.5K

Followers284.0K

Votes8.1K

Common Lisp

Stacks265

Followers255

Votes145

Common Lisp vs JavaScript vs Python: What are the differences?

Common Lisp, JavaScript, and Python are three distinct programming languages. Here are some key differences between them:

Common Lisp: Common Lisp is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language known for its flexibility and powerful macro system. It excels in symbolic computation and is often used in AI and expert systems due to its support for symbolic expressions and pattern matching. Common Lisp's macros allow developers to create domain-specific languages, making it a versatile language for building custom abstractions and specialized solutions. However, Common Lisp may have a steeper learning curve compared to JavaScript and Python, and its ecosystem may not be as extensive for certain application domains.
JavaScript: JavaScript is a widely-used, high-level programming language primarily used for web development. It is the de facto language for building interactive and dynamic web pages. JavaScript is well-supported across browsers, making it a popular choice for client-side scripting. With the advent of Node.js, JavaScript can now also be used on the server-side, enabling full-stack web development. Its asynchronous nature and event-driven model make it suitable for handling concurrent operations, making it popular for real-time web applications. However, JavaScript's dynamic typing may lead to potential runtime errors, which can be addressed by using TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript that adds static typing.
Python: Python is a general-purpose programming language known for its simplicity, readability, and ease of use. It has a large and active community, extensive libraries, and frameworks that make it versatile for various domains, including web development, data science, automation, and scripting. Python's clear and readable syntax, along with its strong emphasis on code readability, contributes to its popularity among beginners and experienced developers alike. Python's extensive standard library and third-party packages simplify development tasks, allowing developers to accomplish more with less code. Additionally, Python's static typing with optional type hinting, introduced in Python 3.5, enhances code maintainability and type safety.

In summary, Common Lisp is a powerful language for symbolic computation and custom abstractions, JavaScript is well-suited for web development with its client-side and server-side capabilities, and Python is a versatile language with a rich ecosystem that excels in readability and ease of use, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.

🔥 Trending in Languages on StackShare

Flyde Languages

An open-source visual programming language

Try it View Docs Alternatives

Try

0

7

Advice on Python, JavaScript, Common Lisp

Thomas

Talent Co-Ordinator at Tessian

Mar 11, 2020

Decided

In December we successfully flipped around half a billion monthly API requests from our Ruby on Rails application to some new Python 3 applications. Our Head of Engineering has written a great article as to why we decided to transition from Ruby on Rails to Python 3! Read more about it in the link below.

263k views263k

Comments

Avy

Apr 8, 2020

Needs adviceon

React Native

Python

Flutter

I've been juggling with an app idea and am clueless about how to build it.

A little about the app:

Social network type app ,
Users can create different directories, in those directories post images and/or text that'll be shared on a public dashboard .

Directory creation is the main point of this app. Besides there'll be rooms(groups),chatting system, search operations similar to instagram,push notifications

I have two options:

@{React Native}|tool:2699|, @{Python}|tool:993|, AWS stack or
@{Flutter}|tool:7180|, @{Go}|tool:1005| ( I don't know what stack or tools to use)

722k views722k

Comments

Ítalo

VP Platform Engineering at Lykon

Feb 19, 2020

Decided

We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.

In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.

261k views261k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Python	JavaScript	Common Lisp
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.	JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.	Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]
Statistics
GitHub Stars 69.7K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 33.3K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 250.8K	Stacks 372.5K	Stacks 265
Followers 205.3K	Followers 284.0K	Followers 255
Votes 6.9K	Votes 8.1K	Votes 145
Pros & Cons
Pros 1184 Great libraries 965 Readable code 848 Beautiful code 789 Rapid development 692 Large community Cons 53 Still divided between python 2 and python 3 28 Performance impact 26 Poor syntax for anonymous functions 22 GIL 19 Package management is a mess	Pros 1670 Can be used on frontend/backend 1497 It's everywhere 1163 Lots of great frameworks 899 Fast 746 Light weight Cons 22 A constant moving target, too much churn 20 Horribly inconsistent 15 Javascript is the New PHP 9 No ability to monitor memory utilitization 8 Shows Zero output in case of ANY error	Pros 24 Flexibility 22 High-performance 17 Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL 13 Stable 12 Lisp Cons 4 Too many Parentheses 3 Standard did not evolve since 1994 2 No hygienic macros 2 Small library ecosystem 1 Inadequate community infrastructure
Integrations
Django	No integrations available	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Python, JavaScript, Common Lisp?

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Swift

Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.

Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.