Say, someone who has no prior experience with programming, and is at a rather 'young' age (Teen still) wants to get ahead of the game, and start up now, rather than later. Would one go about this by reading SICP? I've seen it linked so many times, I've only got to think it's a start.
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Anonymous2010-04-08 10:29
>>77 Implying a scripting language isn't, first of all, a programming language
the only thing that differentiates a scripting language is that its interpreted and runs on a VM. Sun was and MS is trying to convert the Java VM and .NET VM to handle dynamic typing. If that happens then even Java and C# will be scripting languages
The whole reason of not providing TCO on Python is somewhat stupid. In CL, the standard doesn't require TCO, but most implementations provide it, and the user can turn it on/off (implementation-specific), that way, you can see full backtraces when you want them, or only perform TCO locally on some functions, or globally if you wish, or turn off TCO on some piece of code, and so on. It's always the user's choice. I don't see why Python couldn't take such an approach, but then that would go against that silly rule of THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO DO IT.
>>88
I don't get Python. FIOC is a bit obscene to my mind1, but my real issue with it is that it throws exceptions at the drop of a hat. Exceptions should be exceptional, not flow control.
__________________________________________ 1. Google's Go works the other way: they removed the parens from flow control but kept the braces. It saves you just about as much typing, but also maintains the concrete (as opposed to what strikes me as 'coincidental') separation of code blocks. It still provides FIOC, but it does it for you in the formatter. (Of course they still found plenty of ways to fuck everything up, like removing semicolons aggressively enough to make certain common expressions ambiguous to the programmer.)