Python becoming less Lisp-like

[Paul Boddie]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote in message news:<86acp3jk1e.fsf at guru.mired.org>...
> 
> The real problem is that newbies won't know which features are "meta"
> features best left to experts, and which features are ok for everyday
> programmers to use.

I think the original contributor to this thread was fairly accurate
when he described some of the confusion that newcomers to Python have
upon encountering Python's "transititonal" situation. I recall seeing
a thread fairly recently where someone wanted to know if they should
be using new-style classes or not, and whilst new-style classes do
introduce some desirable behaviour, being told to inherit from object
and then seeing lots of older code which doesn't do so raises a
certain amount of uncertainty on the part of the newcomer.

Everyone likes to criticise Java for additional notation which seems
like distracting boilerplate that obstructs the learning process (eg.
"public static void main"), but it would be worse if such notation
were optional and if programs still had a main function/method by some
other now-unfashionable means. Some of that uncertainty (albeit at
less visible levels) does now exist in Python, raising the issue of
coding "best practices" that I never thought would arise with the
language.

Paul