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Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

Pascal Costanza costanza at web.de
Fri Oct 10 13:24:32 EDT 2003 
Alex Martelli wrote:

> Pascal Costanza wrote:
> 
> 
>>Matthias wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Why the smiley?  Many hours of discussions could be spared if there
>>>were real, scientific, solid studies on the benefit of certain
>>>language features or languages in certain domains or for certain types
>>>of programmers.
>>
>>This presumes that language features can be judged in isolation. I think
>>it's rather more likely that good programming languages are holistic
>>systems, in the sense that the whole language is more than the sum of
>>its features.
> 
> 
> ...and/or less, if N features are just offering N different ways to
> perform essentially the same tasks, of course.  Still, be the whole
> more or less than "the sum of the parts", one still can't rule out
> (as no "hard-scientific studies" are ever likely to exist) such
> non-linearities and complications.  This, of course, points out that
> programming languages are NOT "mathematics", as some claim -- they
> are engineering designs, and interact with human minds, sociology
> of groups, cultural and educational features, at least as much as
> they interact with the architecture and capabilities of computers.

I definitely agree. Computer science is more a sociological science than 
a natural science IMHO.

Pascal
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