Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to have just a bit more syntactic flexibility.

[Anh Hai Trinh]

On Feb 23, 1:03 pm, "Alf P. Steinbach" <al... at start.no> wrote:
>
> Uhm, Paganini...
>
> As I understand it he invented the "destroy your instruments on stage". :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Alf (off-topic)

You probably meant Franz Liszt, who regularly broke piano strings.
Paganini was also a "rock-star" virtuoso but he did not destroy any
Guarnerius or Stradivarius violins in his possession (at least not to
anyone's knowledge :)

As for functional programming, different people take it to mean
different things. For some, simply using first-class functions
qualifies as functional programming.  Others require their functions
to be pure so that their call graphs can be automatically reduced and
their results can be lazily evaluated.  If you takes the former view,
most Python programmers already do functional programming :p

--aht