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Comment by pmelendez | Hacker News Reader

This is so far my biggest disagreement with Guido and Python.

Comments like "Third, I don't believe in recursion as the basis of all programming." and recursion "is just a nice theoretical approach to fundamental mathematics (turtles all the way down), not a day-to-day tool." Makes me wonder how long he was exposed to Scheme. For me, programming in Scheme is a wonderful experience, way more pleasant that in Python.

In Scheme is really clear what is an efficient or inefficient piece of code. Rather in Python, where I found myself going back and forward trying to figuring out what is happening behind the scenes to see if I can do it in a more efficient way.

Don't get me wrong, I will take a slow Python against something faster like Java any day. But I have Scheme in the top of my preferences and that hasn't changed since 17 years ago when I was introduced to Scheme for first time.

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I'm not missing Scheme-like recursion from Python that much since Guido borrowed features from Icon and other languages that helps me do much of the crap that used require nasty loops. (Love me some iterators!)

Iterators are great! I think I prefer thinking in terms of recursion because it helps me break it into subproblems better. That doesn't invalidate anyone's preference for iterators or generators. And you Python devs have nice list comprehensions as well, so I don't doubt that you have no real need for recursion.

But I will say it seems really weird to me to refuse tail-call recursion flat out. People even do it in C as an optimization (http://llvm.org/docs/Passes.html#tailcallelim-tail-call-elim...).

Maybe not, but perhaps you'll later run into something you are missing from the language and Guido (PBUH) won't add add it. With Lisp (incl. Scheme), you can add it yourself.

I like Scheme, but I have this desire to be productive without reinventing the wheel or most of the automobile. If it's not in the core Python language, chances are it's a feature in one the almost infinite selection of third party modules. Or can be done in C and called from Python.

Maybe you should give Clojure a try, which is a pragmatic Lisp in my opinion. You don't have to reinvent the wheel most of the time since you have access to a vast array of Java libraries.

Unfortunately Clojure is one of the few lisps without proper tail calls. (I love Clojure I just thought I should point this out in the context of the discussion).

>Unfortunately Clojure is one of the few lisps without proper tail calls. (I love Clojure I just thought I should point this out in the context of the discussion).

Fortunately, thanks to Clojure being a Lisp, you can add it yourself:

https://github.com/cjfrisz/clojure-tco

Thank you for posting this! I wanted for a long time to see a concrete example of adding a feature to a Lisp language, I will study that code.

this was amusing: https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1838308947

Uh, recursion doesn't have to be the basis of computation. It certainly can be, but it's not how you have to think of stuff. Iterative algorithms are perfectly cromulent.

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