[itistoday]

> Just because you already happen to have a certain function at your disposal doesn't mean your language is suddenly superior.

You are certainly correct in that. That's not what makes Lisps superior to all other languages though, "it's the syntax stupid."

Edit: Sorry, I know that comment appears trollish (and it is), what I meant to say is that unlike Python, Lisp(s) have virtually no syntax, and are more powerful because they treat code as data. It would take me a blog post to explain why that's important, but if you give the language a shot you will see why that is (and compare how long it takes you to learn it to how long it took you to learn Python!).

[jshen]

Isn't there more to power than that? For example, in clojure you can't change the binding of a function in a namespace after it has been compiled. In python or ruby you do have the power to do that.

[itistoday]

I'm not a Clojure expert, so I can't directly address that, but from the little that I know of Clojure though, I think you can do that by binding a function to a var, and then changing the binding of the var. (Can any Clojure experts exlaborate?)

Regardless, every Lisp that I am able to comment on (newLISP, elisp, Scheme, CL) can do that easily, so I doubt that Clojure would have difficulty with this.

[jshen]

It does have difficulty with this, check the mailing list. Just because something using s-expressions doesn't mean you can override functions in a namespace.

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...;

[itistoday]

Thanks for that interesting thread! I do know though that newLISP can do this easily with a simple 'set' call.