merits of Lisp vs Python

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 14:35:07 +0000, Kirk Sluder wrote:

> In article 
> <pan.2006.12.10.13.28.42.581905 at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au>,
>  Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> And here I was thinking that languages fell from the sky like donuts!
>> Gosh, thank you for explaining that too me. What a fool I must seem!
> 
> Certainly that is what you wrote. If you had not meant that English 
> enforces restrictions on expressiveness, perhaps you should not have 
> written it.

Okay, I'm trying to meet a common ground here, but you're not making it
easy. Of course English, like all languages, restricts what can be said in
that language. I'm talking about grammar and syntax, not semantics, just
like I said at the beginning.

I don't expect that there are concepts that can't be expressed in English
(although some linguists disagree -- see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). But
there are many restrictions on *how* we express things. That means that
some concepts can't be expressed as briefly and succinctly in English as
in other languages (and, naturally, vice versa). 

Oh, you might also like to look up what a straw-man argument is before
continuing to accuse people of making it. There seems to be this myth on
the Internet and Usenet that a straw-man argument is "any argument I don't
like, or don't understand, or can't refute".


> If we both agree that the rules of languages are social, then we 
> should both agree that in the case of programming language, 
> communities of language users help to constrain how the language is 
> used by rejecting extensions that are not lispy/pythonic, and 
> accepting extensions that converge with accepted style. 

That might be true in the case of public code which is open to the entire
community, but it isn't true of all code. Not all code is open to the
wider programmer community to inspect. Code gets written in small teams,
or by individuals, and then it gets used by potentially millions of people
who never got to review the code but have to suffer the consequences of
any bugs in it.

(I'm not saying this is uniquely a problem caused by Lisp macros. Don't
misinterpret what I'm saying.)


-- 
Steven.