Iterating through two lists

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Oleg Broytmann <phd at phd.pp.ru>:
| On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 01:40:40PM +0200, jb wrote:
|> Thx. Have you read by any chance Paul Graham's article at 
|> http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html ? He makes a few remarks as to how 
|
|    Just yesterday I was visiting his page and reading his articles. He is
| one of the clearest thinkers and writers I've ever saw.
|
|> Python is not (yet) sufficient, if I understod correctly. I should be 
|> intrested in a Python expert's opinion on this.
|
|    Well, rough (if not rude) approximation of his idea is "Python is still
| not List, and thus is not yet sufficient." Yes, he definitely has good
| reasons to admire Lisp, but other people may disagree with the idea
| "whatever is not Lisp is not sufficient".

Paul Prescod was right (as paraphrased on the followup page linked
in the page above) - he really did choose an example that favored
Lisp.

The function that carries data is cool enough.  Lisp does it easier
than Python, and in fact does "functional programming" better than
Python by a long shot.  But then, Python does OOP better than Lisp!
He seems vaguely mystified that Python programmers would favor the
much more tedious class solution, but of course if you wanted to add
some requirement like support two functions over that data instead
of just one, then the mystery evaporates.

And no doubt a Haskell list comprehension would look pretty good for
the present problem, even though Python has its own list comprehensions.
When you take on a comparison between two decent languages, though,
you have a lot of impossible questions about which big picture concepts
are really going to pay off.  Does OOP live up to its promise on
re-use of code, can ordinary people really "get" functional programming
and become really productive in it, does one approach or another really
reduce complexity in a meaningful way.  Jury's still out.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com