UserLinux chooses Python as "interpretive language" of choice

[Ville Vainio]

"John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> writes:

> Notice that there is only one polarity here: Perl vs Python. Ruby goes
> meta on the discussion in that it looks at what the customer (the developer)
> *wants*, rather than what the language designer thinks they should have.

Customer is often less informed than the language designer. I think
someone mentioned somewhere that Perl is a "popularity whore", I guess
the same applies to Ruby. I can rest assured that Python won't start
decaying because the language designers wanted to please the whims of
some members of the audience.

> Most businesses would look at a competitor who is stealing customers
> as an opportunity to figure out what those customers want that they
> aren't getting.

Fair enough. Someone might want to compile a list where the issue
could be dissected once and for all. A lot of the issues rubyists have
tend to be along the lines of "well, Python has this feature *now*,
but it wasn't in version blah blah when I tried it. We had it since
the beginning, so it is not an add-on but a real feature!". IOW, they
fall apart w/ even a minor analysis.

> and in the case of list comprehensions, pretty darned useful although
> I think that it's a rather baroque addition to an otherwise very clear
> and comprehensible language.

List comprehensions are, for me, one of the killer features in Python
that raise Python above all other languages (Haskell has them, but
it's.. umm.. Haskell and one would be laughed out of the office if he
suggested Haskell for implementing anything).

> There is no replacement for lambda in sight, even though lambda is
> arguably the ***largest single*** one of the functional constructs
> that needs work, and has obviously needed work for a long time.

Party line is that ppl should just define a function with a name. It
might not be the most comfortable option at the time of writing the
code, but it will make the program more readable. It is definitely not
a big enough of a problem to switch the language.

Hmm, I wonder if it is the time to start crossposting this to c.l.ruby
and let the flamewar start. It's been a while already ;-).

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://www.students.tut.fi/~vainio24