Python's simplicity philosophy

[Ville Vainio]

"Donn Cave" <donn at drizzle.com> writes:

> Python may be a hybrid, but certainly none of its parents were FPLs.
> Trying to make it one gives both Python and FP a bad name.  If you

I don't think there is much "trying to make Python a FPL" involved w/
making lots of tried-and-true FPL constructs available in Python. It's
just taking stuff that works and enabling us to use it w/o encumbering
the language (because it's in the modules). It's all good as long as
we don't go the way of doing everything w/ recutrsion.

> want a language that really supports both functional and procedural 
> styles, I think you need Lisp.  Look at Dylan, I haven't tried it but
> it may be quite a bit more comfortable for Python and C programmers.

Lisp is too verbose for my tastes (I don't want to write 'let' ot
'setq'), doesn't have much in the way of libs and generally doesn't
feel as 'right' as Python (I do use Emacs Lisp occasionally,
though.. and will try out some CL one of these days). Dylan, OTOH,
doesn't seem to be all that active a project, at least the last time I
checked.

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