What can python replace?

[Avi Gross]

All this talk about language names makes me ask what can evolved languages like python replace?

 

I mean clearly a language like ancient BASIC which had GOTO and GOSUB verbs may not be anything worth considering.

 

But if there was a language that broke though as a functional programming language, could it easily be replaced by a multi-purpose language like python that arguably does that well too? What about one that focused on an object-oriented approach? Note that these are just buzz words and the implementation choices are often far from the same. But I suspect there are languages with a fairly simple and narrow toolset, that could be easily translated into fairly equivalent python if you also supplied some modules/libraries that could be linked in to supply functionality and translate some protocols that differ such as wrapping a function call with arguments that are in a different order so they call properly. 

 

The above is far from easy in some ways, of course. I won’t supply my endless examples, but will say that some features are different enough like whether you short-circuit “A or B and C” where A,B,C are arbitrary expressions with potential side effects, so a translation from another language that does not might require:

 

resultA = A

resultB = B

resultC = C

 

And now that you have forced all three to be evaluated, you can do “resultA or result and result” where not re-evaluating some does not matter.

 

I know there is no way to vote any languages off the team. I suspect in real life many companies, projects, etc., have already migrated to new development environments over the years. Do we know of examples that have literally migrated to python including not just new code but existing code?

 

One interesting side to this might be part of a consideration of how a language like python can decide on changes and new features. If told that users of some language just need a few more tweaks and python would then meet their needs, is that a good reason?

 

I really would not want to see features like GOTO restored 😊