Language Specific Comparisons

I've read quite a bit of Paul Graham's articles regarding Lisp, how awesome Lisp is, how much of a dufus one might be for using a language programmed for dufuses.

Now, before I start, I should mention that these posts are quite old, and I don't really want to start a flame fest over this again. However, I couldn't help but notice today with a problem I had in my code, how easy Python made the solution (Zach points out the Lisp solution is quite succinct as well).

Without a doubt, Lisp excels at recursion, function/code generation, and closures. This frequently leaves Lisp looking like a god when you see how many lines of code other languages take to replicate the examples Paul chooses to compare (which always revolve around the things Lisp excels at as Paul Prescod points out)

Today, I came across a fairly common case, where I had a function taking keyword arguments and collecting them all. That would look like this in Python:

def somefunc(**kargs):

Now, if I want to take two of those keyword being passed in, and set some defaults so they're not required but will always have something set in the function body, its rather easy:

def somefunc(keyone='default', keytwo='anotherdefault', **kargs):

So in one line, I have now added two defaults that will be available in my function body for use. [STRIKEOUT:How succinct is this in Lisp?] What about in Ruby?

I cite two languages that came off very well in the Accumulator Generator shoot-off. [STRIKEOUT:They] Ruby doesn't do quite as well in this case, which I've actually encountered far more than the code generation cases Graham is apt to cite. (I actually like Ruby and am now using it quite a bit, I'll be quite happy when it has keyword args)

What's even worse is where in this thread that I referenced above, Graham at the end says he has no clue how one would create a basic class to handle accumulation in Lisp. [STRIKEOUT:I find that rather disturbing that something so easy in Python has Graham saying, “God only knows.” how to do it in Common Lisp] Richard points out below that this is because PaulG is rather keen on macros, and not so big on OO. That makes complete sense to me as Lisp did not start out with OO features, those were added later when it was all the rage. When working in an elegant functional language like Lisp I can see why one would never have to consider OO.

That alone should indicate that many technical comparisons between languages can be easily skewed towards a language by using examples that heavily favor built-in abilities of the language one chooses to boast about.

In the end, I'm left with the belief that different languages have different applications. Claiming one language is the be-all, and is always better for any task is about as false as claiming that a language has no problems or issues.

Within certain realms it does make sense to compare languages, scripting vs scripting, functional vs functional, etc. But leaping to a comparison of functional/dynamic-typed vs non-functional/static-typed is typically going to result in some strange claims.

Anyways, if you feel like commenting, try and come up with an example of where Language X (that you use) has a very succinct solution compared to Language Z (all the others). It'd be great to compare some examples and see areas in which different languages fall flat on their face when it comes to succinctness. (Ie, in most dynamic languages, you'd have to add several lines of code to ensure variables are the type you want. A feature/annoyance of static-typed languages)

Update: An anonymous user kindly informs me that there's no foundation for my claim that some languages are better in certain realms than others, unfortunately the anonymous user fails to say why.

Ruby has no keyword arguments currently (Ruby 2 will have them and keyword collectors ** as Python does). To even approximate my Python example in Ruby, you'd first need to declare the argument as optional which has the side effect of packaging it into an Array. Wheras in Python **kargs packages up the rest of the key/vals under a dictionary. If someone would like to write out the full translation in Ruby, I'd be happy to put it up here, but I doubt its going to be pretty (until Ruby 2).

Zach was helpful and provided an example showing that the specific task I cited is fairly short in Lisp as well, looking like this:

(defun somefunc (&rest kwargs
                 &key (keyone "default") (keytwo "anotherdefault")
                 &allow-other-keys)
                 ; ...
                 )

I would like to make it very clear that my point is not that Python is better, but that technical comparisons can be warped to favor certain languages. This is the same point Paul Prescod makes, and what I'd actually like to see is more technical comparisons that make this point obvious.