merits of Lisp vs Python

[Jon Harrop]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> 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.

Yes. My point is that I only had to add four locks in 15kLOC of F# code
because my code was almost entirely pure. So F# is a long way towards that
Haskell ideal whilst having many other advantages over Haskell, like
predictable memory usage.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet