From: Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@...>
Date: 2005-03-20T05:43:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Paul Graham recommends Ruby

Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca> writes:

> 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?

No yield:

def foo(x, y)
  x.call
  y.call
end

foo {|x|...}, {|y|...}

>> 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.

Not that mine and Larry Wall's wouldn't be very different. :-P

But it's fine with me.  Not that I liked Python before that decision.
But Graham will(does?) now probably push a different language, since
he really is pro-Lisp, not pro-Python.

> 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.  :-)

Hey, even PHP has them.  Though that probably would be a good language
to remove "lambdas" of. }:-) Must be *really* crippled from what I
heard.

>> 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.

There are arguments both for Lisp-1 and Lisp-2s.  And while I prefer
Lisp-1s, object-oriented languages are "better off" if they are
Lisp-2s IMHO.

> Cheers,
> Navin.
-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirchen@gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org