On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 03:53:58PM +1000, Angus Lees wrote: > > > http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html > > > the later points in the description of "what made lisp different" > > > (about 1/3 of the way in) exactly describes several "emerging" > > > commonalities i've been seeing in recent languages, but i hadn't been > > > able to put into words until now. > > Yes, I thought the same. It's a pity that LISP's syntactical form, > > the inefficiency of poorly written LISP programs and a general lack of > > library support often makes it as popular among programmers as a leper at a > > beauty pageant. > and now they expect humans to read and write XML instead of lisp, and > think thats an improvement (grumble).
Well, it's an improvement over what the programming mainstream was doing before. Sometimes. > i mostly agree. the big thing holding me back from python is > closures. once python gets proper anonymous, lexically scoped > subroutines things will start to look up. Does from __future__ import nested_scopes do what you want? Sorry, I haven't read the definitions of lexical etc. scoping in some years now. > alternatively, we could all just start using lisp now and skip the > next decade or so of language "development" ;) It would be sorely tempting except for the poor library support, which is frankly a bit of a killer. I don't see much point in using an absolutely fantastic language that can't interface to anything. -- Mark, embittered -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
