Would Anonymous Functions Help in Learning Programming/Python?

[Kay Schluehr]

On Sep 22, 10:40 am, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch <bj_... at gmx.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:47:37 -0700, Kay Schluehr wrote:
> > On 22 Sep., 08:56, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> >> Kay Schluehr <kay.schlu... at gmx.net> writes:
> >> > If you feel you can transform it into another unambigous grammar
> >> > mixing statements and expressions it's up to you.
>
> >> We got rid of the print statement for python 3.0.  Why not get rid
> >> of the rest of them too?  Just use expressions for everything, as
> >> works fine for plenty of other languages.
>
> > One might create a new dynamic functional+OO programming language,
> > where small statements like print, assert, raise etc. all become
> > functions and statements like while, for, with etc. become anonymous
> > closures.
>
> Before someone starts to create such a thing he should take a look at Io
> which has just objects and methods.
>
>  http://www.iolanguage.com/
>
> Ciao,
>         Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

I checked out Io once and I disliked it. I expected Io's prototype OO
being just a more flexible variant of class based OO but Io couples a
prototype very closely to its offspring. When A produces B and A.f is
modified after production of B also B.f is modified. A controls the
state of B during the whole lifetime of B. I think parents shall not
do this, not in real life and also not in programming language
semantics.

There was another, similar and also abandoned project a while ago
heading for prototype OO called Prothon:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-announce-list/2004-March/002966.html

When I remember correctly it was killed not because it was too
ambitious but the author lost his vision and didn't want to grow
Prothons ecosystem.