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I sing the praises of lambda, my friend and savior!

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Fri Oct 15 03:04:54 EDT 2004 
Jeff Shannon <jeff at ccvcorp.com> wrote:
   ...
> certainly entitled to his opinion, but there are others who *do* agree
> with Python's design goals.  ISTM that it would therefore be better, 
> overall, for those who disagree with Pythonic philosophy to look for a
> different language that suits them better, and those who agree with 
> Pythonic philosophy to keep using Python.  Trying to please everyone 
> with a single language just isn't gonna work, nor should it be expected

Amen, hallelujah.  There are thousands and thousands of programming
languages, and more are born all the time.  Trying to make one language
please all is a doomed endeavour: "if you want PL/I, you know where to
find it" (apparently that was Ritchie's stock answer to Thompson's
occasional whines that C didn't allow this, that, or the other -- C
shares with Python the underlying ideal of "there should be one obvious
way", indeed Python shares 4.5 of the 5 principles that the ANSI C
Standard introduction defines as "the Spirit of C").


> Oh, and I almost agree with you about list comprehensions -- they'd do
> just as well to be left out of Py3K, because they've been superseded by
> generator comprehensions. ;)

"Generator expressions" is the recommended terminology nowadays.  But I
agree, list(x+x for x in foo) is a perfectly acceptable alternative to
the equivalent List Comprehension [x+x for x in foo] and in Python 3.0
the latter is therefore likely to be removed, as part of the overall
idea of removing many "legacy" things, accumulated over the years, and
make Python more pythonic.

Hacking on CPython on a vast scale is too hard to bother, but if and
when pypy matures, assuming 3.0 still looks far away at that point, I'd
like to make a "prototype 3.0" based strictly on removing stuff (moving
some redundant stuff to a legacy package in the standard library where
feasible, or else just excising it).  Ah well, one can dream!-)


Alex
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