Python report-writing mechanism?

[Donald Allen]

Derek wrote:

Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> writes:

> Hint: Derek is a MIT person -- LISP was a big deal there.  There are
> other MIT alumni that still use LISP (check out www.itasoftware.com --
> LISP actually lives there too).  LISP is not as moribund as many people
> think...

I'll note that while I AM an MIT person, I've never been fond of LISP
or Scheme.  I did study it, and I'm fairly comfortable using it, but
I certainly had nothing to do with choosing scheme/guile as the
scripting language in GnuCash.  It was chosen before I started using
(or developing) GnuCash, and I've been around the project since 1999.

-derek

I write:

This is a religious issue and a subjective one, so I won't attempt to
dissuade you from your opinion, but I will say that I disagree with
you completely about Lisp and Scheme. Did you take 6.001? With Jerry
Sussman? Have you read Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs? I'm asking just out of curiousity -- not trying to provoke a
confrontation.

For myself, I've been writing code for 47 years (I literally wrote my
first computer program in 1960 -- assembly language for an IBM 1620)
and have done it professionally since 1964. You name the language and
I've written code in it (including a lot of assembly code for System
360/370 and PDP-10 operating systems). I am still actively writing
code (in support of extracting money from the financial markets with
computers -- legally), I do know Python and think it's excellent, and
know other popular (and awful IMHO) scripting languages, such as a lot
of tcl, a little perl (Paul Graham described perl programs, perfectly,
as looking like a cartoon character cursing). I've also written a lot
of C over the years. But I have yet to find a language that combines
the expressive power of Scheme with its conceptual simplicity. Jerry,
who is an old and dear friend and who I have worked with off and on
over the years (most recently I spent 4 happy years in his group at
MIT), and Guy Steele (who I worked with years ago at Thinking
Machines) found something close to the minimal basis-set in Scheme.
There are just a minimal number of special cases in Scheme compared to
other languages. That, combined with its ability to perform
computations on programs as well as data, makes it unsurpassed to this
day, despite its age, in my opinion.

I confess I haven't read this thread carefully, but I got the
impression that there's a plan a-foot to have C take on some of the
role played by Scheme now? I'm a little unclear as to how that relates
to the plan to move some of the report-writing function from Scheme to
HTML+Scheme, but moving from Scheme to C for ease-of-programming (as
opposed to performance) reasons would make no sense to me. My $.02.

/Don