What does Python fix?

[François Pinard]

[,,,]

> >Even Scheme has vectors.

> Why 'even' Scheme ? In comparison to ...???

Many people consider Scheme has being a toy, and not any Lisp.  In my
correspondence with various people, I observed that this lack of praise
is recurrent from people who like Common Lisp.  I would expect that PL/I
people despise Pascal in similar ways, for similar reasons.  I do not take
offence of remarks like the above, and you should not either.  These only
represent cultural differences, and I'm sure no harm was ever intended.

For one, I am attracted to simplicity, and this is why I loved Pascal in
its time, and have been very happy with Scheme before discovering Python.
In my youth, I used Lisp a lot, and contributed Lisp interpreters, compilers
and loaders.  I also did my PL/I duties very carefully.  In a word, I tasted
complexity, my love for simplicity is not a purely intellectual exercise. :-)

I made a few big applications with Gambit: a full Scheme implementation
with nice and usable system interfaces for extensions.  It also offers an
optimising compiler producing C, which you can then turn into machine code.
I got CPU intensive, difficult applications to fly at reasonable speed.

We should not be overly snob or fussy: it's incredible all the good work
you can do with toys :-), when these are well designed and implemented!

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard