merits of Lisp vs Python

[Raffael Cavallaro]

On 2006-12-17 07:54:28 -0500, Jon Harrop <jon at ffconsultancy.com> said:

> What if eager impurity isn't the "very nature" of the problem but, rather,
> is the very nature of Tilton's chosen solution?

That's the whole point which you keep missing - that a programming 
language is expressive precisely to the extent that it allows you to 
express the solution in the *programmer's* chosen form, not the 
paradigm imposed by the language.

You look down your nose at cells, but if that's the way kenny conceived 
of the problem - as a graph of changing state, why should he be forced 
to reconceptualize it according to someone else's notion of programming 
correctness (be that pure functional or any other paradigm)?

By asking this question you've implicitly admitted that to solve it *as 
he thought of it* in a pure functional language would require 
reconceptualizing it (i.e., the aforementioned "jumping through 
hoops"). We don't want to reconceptualize everything according to a 
particular paradigm, we want the flexibility to write the solution to 
the problem in the terms we think and talk about it, not the 
procrustean bed of pure functional semantics.