Guido's final word on Tail Calls

Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls by magv on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @08:14AM (#583017)

I am surprised (and to some extent disappointed) that he did not know about trampolines, as it's common knowledge among language implementors (e.g. it's used everywhere to implement proper tail recursion for FFI calls).

Somehow I though that being a language creator (or working on a compiler for a decade) implies unimaginable amount of knowledge...

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Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls by briancooley on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @09:52AM (#583105)

Doing a lot trumps knowing a lot, even when you make mistakes. It's amazing what GVR has accomplishled despite (apparently) being ignorant of things other language designers know about.

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Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls by eru on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @09:24AM (#583068)

Guido didn't even know about ephemeral and persistent data structures (see early comments at [1]). At least not by that name.

But that's not a problem. Python, Perl etc have caught on, while Haskell has still a long way to go.

[1] http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimi...

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Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls by Hexstream on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @11:50AM (#583335)

If he hadn't built so much, he might have had time to learn all that "theoretical" stuff (that can actually help in practice)...

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Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls by 10ren on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @10:58AM (#583198)

Another point of view is to be disappointed in language theory, if one can be so incredibly successful without it.

Reminds me of Edison.

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Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls by parenthesis on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @11:07AM (#583215)

I think GvR's special expertise is more in the 'user-interface' of programming languages than in their implementation. The whole point of Python, really, is to put the former before the latter; which is exemplified in GvR's 'readable-stack-traces before fancy-features-in-the-implementation' reasoning on the present point.

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Re:Guido's final word on Tail Calls by 10ren on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @11:51AM (#583337)

Even if you’re designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better results regardless of what you’re trying to do if you think of it as a user-interface design. Alan Kay http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

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