Python's "only one way to do it" philosophy isn't good?

[Douglas Alan]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:

> Douglas Alan <doug at alum.mit.edu> writes:

>> But that's a library issue, not a language issue.  The technology
>> exists completely within Lisp to accomplish these things, and most
>> Lisp programmers even know how to do this, as application frameworks
>> in Lisp often do this kind.  The problem is getting anything put into
>> the standard.  Standardizing committees just suck.

> Lisp is just moribund, is all.  Haskell has a standardizing committee
> and yet there are lots of implementations taking the language in new
> and interesting directions all the time.  The most useful extensions
> become de facto standards and then they make it into the real
> standard.

You only say this because you are not aware of all the cool dialetcs
of Lisp that are invented.  The problem is that they rarely leave the
tiny community that uses them, because each community comes up with
it's own different cool dialect of Lisp.  So, clearly the issue is not
one of any lack of motivation or people working on Lisp innovations --
it's getting them to sit down together and agree on a standard.

This, of course is a serious problem.  One that is very similar to the
problem with Python vs. Ruby on Rails.  It's not the problem that you are
ascribing to Lisp, however.

|>oug

P.S. Besides Haskell is basically a refinement of ML, which is a
dialect of Lisp.

P.P.S. I doubt that any day soon any purely (or even mostly)
functional language is going to gain any sort of popularity outside of
academia.  Maybe 20 years from now, they will, but I wouldn't bet on
it.