merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

Mathias Panzenboeck <e0427417 at student.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
> I currently visit a course about functional programming at the
> university of technology vienna: python implements only a small
> subset of things needed to be called a functional language (list
> comprehension).  but yes, for a imperativ oop language python is
> very close to functional.

List comprehensions are just fairly trivial syntax sugar.  The essence
of functional programming is being able to construct new functions on
the fly, and Python does that.  See Hughes' paper "Why functional
programming matters" and imagine doing the examples in Python vs. doing
them in Java.