Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Alex Martelli]

Pascal Costanza wrote:

> Matthias wrote:
> 
>> Why the smiley?  Many hours of discussions could be spared if there
>> were real, scientific, solid studies on the benefit of certain
>> language features or languages in certain domains or for certain types
>> of programmers.
> 
> This presumes that language features can be judged in isolation. I think
> it's rather more likely that good programming languages are holistic
> systems, in the sense that the whole language is more than the sum of
> its features.

...and/or less, if N features are just offering N different ways to
perform essentially the same tasks, of course.  Still, be the whole
more or less than "the sum of the parts", one still can't rule out
(as no "hard-scientific studies" are ever likely to exist) such
non-linearities and complications.  This, of course, points out that
programming languages are NOT "mathematics", as some claim -- they
are engineering designs, and interact with human minds, sociology
of groups, cultural and educational features, at least as much as
they interact with the architecture and capabilities of computers.


Alex