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I don't hate them. I've used python more than once, and will continue to do so. And I think it's great teaching material. It's a good scripting language. But I think its drawbacks far outweigh its advantages for large projects.

All your examples are programming gimmicks, and I've yet to see stuff that solves actual hard problems. I'm not interested in programming for programming's sake. I want to use it to make my computer do useful stuff.

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Gimmicks? Some of them, yes, but CLOS and its descendants are used in Real applications, as are the TCL OO systems. But if you want Real World, I'll give you real world.

Maxima is a descendant of the original MACSYMA, developed at MIT. It is still a usable and viable system, even if it has ageda bit.

Emacs is a popular programmer's text editor written in C and a dialect of lisp.

Both of the above programs are large, useful, and written in an HLL - one particularly amenable to pointer chasing, I might add - and they make use of the variety of abstractions which that HLL provides.

If those aren't modern enough for you, check out some Clojure applications.

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