From: Navindra Umanee <navindra@...>
Date: 2005-03-20T05:25:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Paul Graham recommends Ruby

Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm not sure how that could be improved, since it's already doing what
> > it was designed to do.
> 
> I think you can write  foo {|x|...}, {|y|...}  with recent CVS.

What does the syntax for yield look like then?

> For differing values of "successful".  I think it is a well-known fact
> that lambdas (and closures) are a powerful way of abstraction.  He
> *could* easily have them (and whom would they hurt?)...

He probably doesn't want them used at all, and wants all Python code
to look idiomatic.  This is probably the reason for the whole
indentation debacle, in fact.  His design goals and objectives simply
aren't the same as yours or Larry Wall's.

Paul Graham and others have already weighed in on this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html

> All in all, I can't think of any language that gets better because it
> loses lambdas. :-)

I guess he's basically forcing you to use a named function instead of
an anonymous one...  he's not removing functions.  

All in all, to each his own...  there's no dearth of languages with
lambda in them.  :-)

> Ever tried a[1]?

Interesting, no I didn't know that.  I guess this ugliness is needed
to have a separate namespace for variables and functions.  Common Lisp
has the same ugliness.

Cheers,
Navin.