A great Alan Kay quote

[Peter Hansen]

François Pinard wrote:
> [Peter Hansen]
> 
> 
>>Then Perl is an "agglutination of styles", while Python might
>>be considered a "crystallization of features"...
> 
> 
> Grosso modo, yes.  Yet, we should recognise that Python agglutinated
> a few crystals in the recent years. :-)
> 
> It gave up some of its purity for practical reasons.  We got rather far
> from the "There is only one way to do it!" that once was Python motto.

I would call a "pure" language one that had a crystallized style.

Python, on the other hand, is just plain practical.  Thus my
half-humorous attempt at defining it in terms of the features
(with its wide-ranging library and extension modules) rather
than in termso of its style (which as you know can range
from procedural to functional, stopping briefly at object
oriented and "newbie" along the way ;-) ).

-Peter