Re: Accumulator

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

Yikes. This discussion is dangerously close to becoming a Python
vs. Lisp thread. As a longtime Lisp hacker (we still use it in all our
products -- PaulP you may want to check out our web site)
and a Zope/python developer -- it would be a real shame were that to
happen. 

Personally, I find both to be very good and very useful for the kinds
of things they are targeted at. I think the real shame is 'language
designers' who've never built real applications (let me modify
that.. language designers who've built ONE or TWO applications)
extrapolate from their experience to decide what should be good for
the rest of us. I also sorely wish we had a better way of mapping our
mental constructs and understanding languages than the somewhat
adversarial -- 'how would you do code-piece X in language Y', and a
better way to do multilingual programming than CLR -- which is largely
still driven by 'compilation units' and file concepts that date from
forty years ago. Why is it that if you find features in Python or Perl
that you sorely like and wish were added to Lisp (or vice-versa) you
you are going to be stuck like PaulG trying to invent yet another
language.. a lot of work, a lot of risk, and likely not to get
anywhere fast.