I've been bitten by the data-oriented design bug and it has made my experiences with programming so much better. It turns out Python is really good at this style of programming. There are powerful ideas in co-routines and sub-generators that make stream processing minimal and easier to grasp. Simple ideas like decision tables are so easy to implement that I cringe when I see giant state machines serialized across several classes. Implement backtracking with a stack? Why bother -- functions live on a stack and push/pop: yield-from/yield. We can serialize the state of a co-routine... boom, concurrency. Sometimes it's the little things in Python the surprise me the most and are the reason I keep using it.
Avoid classes where you can! Design your programs around your data. Python has plenty of built-in patterns for manipulating data and aggregates. It's sometimes surprising how simple your programs become when you resist the temptation to start modelling your problem as classes.
I would never discourage someone from pursuing Scheme or Lisps in general (Have you seen Hy? Homoiconic front-end to Python's AST). Scheme does encourage thinking about problems as recursive functions. If iteration is a special case of recursion than Python is breaking ground in the same direction just in different clothes.
I've been bitten by the data-oriented design bug and it has made my experiences with programming so much better. It turns out Python is really good at this style of programming. There are powerful ideas in co-routines and sub-generators that make stream processing minimal and easier to grasp. Simple ideas like decision tables are so easy to implement that I cringe when I see giant state machines serialized across several classes. Implement backtracking with a stack? Why bother -- functions live on a stack and push/pop: yield-from/yield. We can serialize the state of a co-routine... boom, concurrency. Sometimes it's the little things in Python the surprise me the most and are the reason I keep using it.
Avoid classes where you can! Design your programs around your data. Python has plenty of built-in patterns for manipulating data and aggregates. It's sometimes surprising how simple your programs become when you resist the temptation to start modelling your problem as classes.
I would never discourage someone from pursuing Scheme or Lisps in general (Have you seen Hy? Homoiconic front-end to Python's AST). Scheme does encourage thinking about problems as recursive functions. If iteration is a special case of recursion than Python is breaking ground in the same direction just in different clothes.