On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 09:21:56 +0200, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > I don't hear Lispers or C programmers complaining.
Lisp is not a popular language. Despite being more powerful, more efficient, and a lot older, I expect that there are far fewer people who know Lisp (let alone use it regularly) than Python. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the Lisp/Scheme family of languages is moribund, but they are certainly niche. And by the way, that niche includes some of the best and brightest developers. (Some of whom are too clever by half, but that's another story.) Merely mediocre programmers don't learn Lisp. So if you take the smartest 0.1% of programmers, and give them a language that lets them chainsaw their leg off, they won't complain, they're just keep their leg out of the way. But if you take the average 50% programmers, and give them a language that lets them chainsaw their leg off, there will be a lot of one-legged programmers. I'm really glad that Lisp exists, but I don't want Python to aspire to be Lisp. In the same way, I am very fond of Forth. Forth too lets you re- define *everything* about the language, including creating new flow- control commands. I love that language. But there is a very good reason why there are a thousand Python coders for every one Forth coder, and it isn't the stack or the reverse Polish notation. As for C, there are a lot of mediocre C programmers writing mediocre C programs filled with buffer overflows, null-pointer bugs and all sorts of other problems. And they don't complain about those either. Because the smart ones know how not to chainsaw their leg off (but even they still make mistakes, which is why there are periodic security vulnerabilities even in code written by people of the calibre of Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel devs), or have moved to another language and write the bare minimum of code in C only when they really need to. > Yes, you can shoot > yourself in the foot with macro trickery, but macros can greatly enhance > code readability Or greatly destroy it, which is precisely the reason why Python doesn't have a macro system. When Guido van Rossum reads Python code, he wants it to look like Python code, not some arbitrary custom-built language. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list