I once inherited maintenance of a critical piece of infrastructure written
in exquisitely well written, tested, and documented Python. I mean it, it
was really really good.

It crashed about once a week and I had to fix it over and over because in
those exponentially vast combinations of paths through the code would arise
yet another way to turn a string into a list, or something analogous. It
was hell.

Critical code needs static typing.

-rob


On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 1:56 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote:

> python can certainly implement tail call optimization (TCO). Pretty much
> any language can implement TCO but for some reason people think such
> programs are harder to debug (and yet they don't similarly complain about
> loops!). The beauty of Scheme was that it *mandated* tail recursion.
>
> > On Aug 2, 2023, at 8:24 PM, George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:
> >
> > Tail recursion not lazy eval.
> >
> > I wish words meant what I meant "inside" when I think them, not
> > "outside" what they mean when I write them.
>
>