brushbox

Chuckle.

That's the best they could come up with? People with more time to complain than brain cells to do it with!

Thanks for the levity. That site made this Ruby developer's day.

I'm not sure I understand your argument about stack traces and functions doing nothing. With TCE (tail-call elimination) the problem with stack traces are thus:

* with self-recursive functions it is no longer possible to see how many times the function has called itself (since the stack trace is collapsed to a single entry for the function rather than a proper trace of each call). This is a non-issue in my opinion - unless you have a language that also lets you know what your function call parameters were for each stack frame (if not then you are left with 'manually' working out where the recursion went wrong). As for debugging - it makes no difference since every self-recursive call made has no further effect on the computation.

* with ordinary tail-calls the issue could be a whole lot more noticeable as it means that given an error the stack trace will no longer contain any information on how you got from A (where you started making a series of tail-calls) to B. This one bears more thought (and I'd be interested in how Scheme implementations deal with this).

You further say "You don't record every function call even though that would be very useful for debugging" and I don't agree. Every debugger I've used records every function call on the stack (effectively the path to the current node in the call graph). If you meant that it doesn't record every function called in the history of the execution of the application - I agree that is useful and can easily be handled with a good logging infrastructure (and I'm sure that at least a few good debuggers would support such a log feature too). In fact, such a logging approach would possibly be an adequate solution to the tail-call problem. However that solution would need some extra "assistance" in order to be a valid approach in a "pure" functional language.

That dreams are much more exciting than mundane reality?

I think it is due to the statement/expression dichotomy that Python exhibits.

Python's lambda doesn't allow the use of statements (correct me if I'm wrong I haven't written Python in a few years and they may have "fixed" this).

Meanwhile Ruby only allows expressions too - the catch here is that everything in Ruby is an expression.