Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Joachim Durchholz]

mike420 at ziplip.com wrote:

> [...] If you [...] think that multimethods are a BIGGER problem than 
> uni-methods, please provide a specific example (in CLOS)

I can't write in CLOS, I'd make all sorts of stupid mistakes since I
never read more than the language specs (and that's several years in the
past).
Anyway, I lost interest in CLOS when I saw those clumsy BEFORE and AFTER
keywords, and that priorization machinery for multimethods. Too
complicated, too liberal (allowing lots of powerful things and lots of
subtle bugs).
I might be conflating this with Scheme, though. I looked at both at
about the same time :-)

I'd really like to see a Lisp dialect that valued reliability over raw
expressive power. But I fear this isn't very high on the agenda of the
Lisp community. Besides, it would be difficult to do that - Lisp offers
no protection against peeking at internals and setting up all that
unsafe-but-powerful stuff. In my eyes, Lisp is a valuable
experimentation lab for new language mechanisms, but not fit for
production use.
Let me add a troll-bait disclaimer: Actually I don't see *any* language
that's fit for production use. All languages are just approximations to
that ideal, some are better, some are worse.
In other words: Lisp is too powerful and dangerous, C++ is too tricky, C
is too low-level, Java is too slow (even when compiled) and slightly too
restricted, [add your favourite language and its deficits here] - choose
your evil...

Regards,
Jo