Lambda: the Ultimate Design Flaw

[Sunnan]

Jeremy Bowers wrote:
> Yes and no. In the Python community, we're taking all of that pretty
> seriously. The scheme community may not seriously be thinking of getting
> rid of those things, but it's hardly impossible that some people think it
> might be better off without it.

Lambda is a primitive in Scheme; in some implementations of scheme it's 
used to implement things like temporary variables (let), sequences 
(begin) and looping (named let/letrec).

Python has other ways of doing these things; and removing things that 
has been obsoleted or superfluous makes sense, for Pythons ideal of 
having one canonical, explicit way to program.

Having a few very abstract primitives that the rest of the language can 
theoretically be built upon is one of the reasons why Scheme/Lisp can 
work as a programmable programming language.

Scheme is like Go - a few abstract rules that can be combined in 
endless, sprawling ways.

Python is like (hmm, better let some pythonista answer this. I'm 
thinking of a game with a clear thematical connection (like Monopoly or 
The Creature that Ate Sheboygan) and a few explicit rules that combine 
in ways that is supposed to have a clear, readable, consistent result). 
Maybe shogi?

(I don't usually read comp.lang.python and I really don't want to offend 
anyone. My apologies if this post is either annoyingly obvious (and thus 
contains only stuff that's been said a million times), or totally wrong.)

Sunnan