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From: Sebastian Wells <sebastian@here.com.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Any marginally usable programming language approaches an ill
 defined barely usable re-implementation of half of Common-Lisp
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2024 06:07:04 -0000 (UTC)
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On Mon, 27 May 2024 12:37:01 -0700, HenHanna wrote:

> On 5/27/2024 7:18 AM, Cor wrote:
>> Some entity, AKA "B. Pym" <No_spamming@noWhere_7073.org>,
>> wrote this mindboggling stuff:
>> (selectively-snipped-or-not-p)
>> 
>>> On 12/16/2023, cor@clsnet.nl wrote:
>>>
>>>> Any marginally usable programming language approaches an ill
>>>>         defined barely usable re-implementation of half of
>>>>         common-lisp
>>>
>>> The good news is, it's not Lisp that sucks, but Common Lisp.
>>>   --- Paul Graham
>> 
>> Just to set the record straight;
>> This is not My line.
>> I quoted it but don't know who the originator of that remark is.
>> 
>> Cor
>> 
>> 
> 
> a few years ago...  when i started learning Python...
> 
>               it was so  exciting...
> 
> Every day i thought...
> 
> --- THis is Lisp in a thin-disguise ... SO  Everyone gets it now.
>                                              Everyone is a Lisper now.

Except it's not Lisp in a thin disguise, but rather an anti-Lisp,
which copies just enough from Lisp to be "marginally usable" as
your quote puts it, and then addresses certain specific use cases
by adding syntactic or semantic special cases, just to stop people
in the early days from listening to Lispers' calls for macros to
be added so that Python's weaknesses could be addressed in general
instead of only in certain special cases.

In some ways, Python is aggressively anti-Lispy, in a way that
cannot be reconciled. Just one example: if you've built up a
list comprehension and suddenly you need to reference the
result of the same computation twice, now you need to turn
the whole thing into a for loop because you can't introduce
variables in the middle of an expression. This is supposedly
"good" because there's some species of idiot who can't
understand expressions, and all Python code must be understandable
to these specific idiots. But it's okay for Python to have
weird special-case behavior that no-one would ever guess is
happening until they're debugging some weird problem in a big
open-source library and see it first hand.