Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Alex Martelli]

Joachim Durchholz wrote:

> Oh, you're trolling for an inter-language flame fest...
> well, anyway:
> 
>> 3. no multimethods (why? Guido did not know Lisp, so he did not know
>>    about them) You now have to suffer from visitor patterns, etc. like
>>     lowly Java monkeys.
> 
> Multimethods suck.

Multimethods are wonderful, and we're using them as part of the
implementation of pypy, the Python runtime coded in Python.  Sure,
we had to implement them, but that was a drop in the ocean in
comparison to the amount of other code in pypy as it stands, much
less the amount of code we want to add to it in the future.  See
http://codespeak.net/ for more about pypy (including all of its
code -- subversion makes it available for download as well as for
online browsing).

So, you're both wrong:-).


Alex