Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

Michele Simionato:

> I don't like that. Scala was designed with the idea of putting
> together the two worlds, by I think the result was to get the
> complications of both worlds.

But some other people may like it, and it's a design experiment worth
doing. Every programming paradigm has advantages, so it's normal for
people to try to design language that have the best of different
worlds. Even if Scala is a failure (and I don't think it is), it's
good to keep trying to design a mixed language (Like Python, that
mixes procedural, some OOP and a bit of functional stiles. It has not
pattern matching stile (Mathematica, OcaML), logic-inferential style
(Prolog), constraint style (Oz, Mozart), data flow style, generic
programming (C++, D), etc).

Today lot of people understand that functional languages have
advantages, so they are trying to created hybrids (Scala, F#, D V.2,
etc), and they may succeed only trying. The purpose is of course to
create a language that isn't too much complex, but has those
advantages anyway. I presume Scala is quite less complex than C++
anyway.


>Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. -- William Clinger<

I think it's false, but it requires me lot of space to explain why. In
few words: Perl is more useful than Scheme if you have to solve a lot
of practical computational problems, despite Scheme looks much more
nicer.

Bye,
bearophile