On Sat, Dec 18, 2021 at 11:40:48PM +0000, Seymour J Metz wrote: [...] > 1. Python programmers are more plentiful
I was "great enthusiast" of Python but that was in days of 1.x . With 2.x, I my enthusiasm became a bit relaxed, but since it could execute 1.x code without problem (for what I know), I just kept doing it like it was 1990-ties and spicing 2.x features here and there. When 3.x came, my enthusiasm went away. There was a number of projects which delayed transition 2->3, some perhaps never did it. Code from 2.x had to be upgraded in order to run on 3.x interpreter. There was automatic tool for automatic translation of the code. Somehow, not everybody was convinced and the community kept on dragging 2.x interpreter for more than five years or so. I do not care much, since it does not affect me, but a new project of mine (if there is any) is not going to be written in Python, I am afraid. Compare to OCaml - the language quite different from Python. Not long ago the developers were celebrating 25th anniversary of their compiler. Someone mentioned his 20 years old code still compiles today without requiring changes. All of the above are just my subjective observations. So take with salt, or pepper or what have you. And, I am not proposing OCaml as replacement for Python, because I have only read about it, never coded a line in it. I remember some folks actually rewrote their Python program(s) in OCaml. Pehaps gog will know. [...] > 8. Python is the language of AI > > LISP? Prolog? "Python and AI" probably means "Python as a frontend to C libraries calling GPU and Deep Learning - something - something". Just what I would think if someone told me that Python is great for numerical simulation - in my mind it would just boil down to "libraries in Fortran being called from Python" becase Fortran programmers are rare and Python programmers are abundant. Some also say such things about Julia and R... LISP is kind of being resuscitated. Or was, last time I had a look. In case of Common Lisp, there are lots of new libraries and there is quicklisp, a very nice library installer. It works, I tried, was very happy. Some libraries are poorly written, but overally the whole effort around Common Lisp made good impression on me. Cons: the CL Hyperspec describes a standard vocabulary of CL, which is almost a thousand words, some with rich semantics (format, loop, maybe some other). It takes a bit of time to get it all (and I am still not there, perhaps I just do not push for it). Pros: see cons. There are other LISP flavours/dialects, but, well, land of Scheme is quite fragmented. There was some effort to define common set of libraries which would work on many Scheme implementations but I am not sure if their websites are responding. There is nice effort named SRFI which defines subsets of functions for different tasks and then Scheme implementations are free to choose which ones they want to support - so, for example, some Schemes will support Unicode, some will only support ASCII. Other LISP dialects are even a bit more limited in their use. Prolog - quite interesting language which I should learn one day... -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:[email protected] ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
