[plt-scheme] guido on tail recursion

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Dimitris Vyzovitis <vyzo at media.mit.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
>
>> I was disappointed that he posted this well past April 1.
>
> So, next april we are removing tail recursion from scheme :p
> Damn him, couldn't he have posted a month ago?
>
>>
>> But given that GC was botched
>> initially, it seems hardly surprising that tail calls are botched,
>> too.
>>
>
> A lot of stuff is botched technically in python, not just gc (closures
> anyone? exceptions? threads?).
> It is as if python is expliclty designed to be the worse in the "worse is
> better".
>
> Oh well; and to think that I used to love python...
>
I still love Python, but I've been spending more and more time in the
PLT documentation and think I'll be writing a lot more stuff in Scheme
this summer.

A more charitable way to look at this is that Python is a work in
progress. It got lots of things wrong in the beginning and has slowly
managed to get them more and more right as it has matured. Somebody
just needs to sneak it in as a patch that looks like it's doing
something else.

Todd