if does not evaluate

[James Moughan]

Jim Newton <jimka at cadence.com> wrote in message news:<40c6e836 at news.cadence.com>...
> Jacek Generowicz wrote:
> > Because
> > you rarely see them used, you conclude that they are not needed. You
> > you make the mistake of confusing your lack of imagination with some
> > inherent quality of the language in question.
> 
> very well said!!
> 
> > 
> > 
> > In spite of its many qualities, Python has a number of
> > shortcomings. Let's stop kidding ourselves that its shorcomings are
> > features.
> > 
> > Python's naff support for anonymous closures is a shortcoming, not a
> > feature.
> > 
> > 
> 
> When i was a child, i thought as a child, and understood as a child,
> but when i became a man, i put childish things behind me.
> 
> When i was a child, i only programmed in BASIC.  At that time
> the only type of variables were global variables, there were no
> function definitions, and no recursion.  i could not imagine
> that being a shortcomming, because i had never seen or used local
> varaibles, and i could handle GOTO quite easily.
> But i was very clever child, and did some powerful things
> with BASIC even with those restrictions.
> 

*wipes a nostalgic tear from his eye*

> Python, being a simple and restrictive language as it is, is still
> quite nice and easy to learn.  It is nice indeed, but lacks some
> features that could make it a much more elagant language.
> 
> On the other hand perhaps the problem is not that Python has
> shortcomings, perhaps the real problem is that LISP is lacking
> lots of useful and mature UNIX and internet specific libraries.
> 
> -jim

Python certainly has a number of problems; one of them is that it's
possible to translate almost any sane language into Python virtually
line by line.  It's not the easiest way to do things, or the best,
because you'll loose most of the places where Python really is more
powerful in it's own right, and regard all of the places where Python
differs from that language as obvious flaws.  Maybe that's why the
Python community has such a strong sense of what's 'idiomatic Python'.
 I still have to restrain myself from writing PyHaskell now and then.

Lisp, I think, has two problems.  

Firstly an attitude among the community that actually *doing* anything
is, well, beneath the language; after working through two books and
several university courses on Lisp, going from the definition of eval
to lexical vs dynamic scoping to macros to continuations, I suddenly
realised that I had no idea how to open a file or do basic string
manipulation.  None of them condescended to sully themselves with such
trivia.

Secondly, Lisp's syntax doesn't parse well into the way people think,
or vica versa.  Python's does; in other words, it's executable
pseudocode.  Lisp, fundamentally, cannot change in this regard.

Jam