merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

Jon Harrop <jon at ffconsultancy.com> writes:
> I discovered this recently with F#. Although F# (as a dialect of OCaml) is
> impure like Lisp, it does make purely functional programming easy and
> provides many purely functional data structures. I translated 15kLOC of
> mostly-functional OCaml code into F# and only had to add four locks to make
> the whole library concurrent.

The idea of the composable-STM stuff is to not add locks at all, just
mark sections as atomic and the right stuff happens automagically
(i.e. you never have to worry about deadlock), including when you nest
such sections.  Its performance also exceeds traditional locking.  But
it relies on Haskell's purity.