blog

Last night I stayed up late read­ing Learn­ing Python. Most of it was ordi­nary pro­gram­ming stuff — “This is a function” — but here are the three things that got me excited and almost gave me goose­bumps. First, being able to return tuples from a func­tion (so you can return mul­ti­ple values from a single func­tion). Wow. Second, map(), which lets you run a spec­i­fied func­tion on a list. (It’s equiv­a­lent to iter­at­ing through the list and call­ing the func­tion man­u­ally, but much cooler.) Third, lamb­das. Hmm, how can I describe lamb­das? In-​line func­tions? That’s not a very useful descrip­tion per se, but oh well. :) Appar­ently lamb­das are one of the things that make Lisp so cool, and I can see why. I’ve been read­ing about metapro­gram­ming and it looks quite inter­est­ing (and ESR men­tions it in his arti­cle, linked to in my last post). Yum. :)

I doubt I’ll ever go back to C now. :)

[tags]Python, Lisp[/tags]