> There are certain kinds of mutually exclusive features that make certain kinds of problems easier or harder.
Right. The fundamental problem with the whole "blub" argument is that there isn't one linear continuum of language power. There are problems for which Erlang's supervision hierarchy and distribution primitives or Prolog's backtracking are a killer feature. This doesn't mean they're "More Powerful than Lisp", just better suited to certain kinds of problems because they committed to some very specific trade-offs.
But, these same trade-offs have far-reaching implications for the language semantics, so you can't just use macros to graft them on after the fact. You can embed a mini-Prolog in Lisp, sure, but adding fully native logic variables (as in Prolog or Oz) would be far from trivial.
Right. The fundamental problem with the whole "blub" argument is that there isn't one linear continuum of language power. There are problems for which Erlang's supervision hierarchy and distribution primitives or Prolog's backtracking are a killer feature. This doesn't mean they're "More Powerful than Lisp", just better suited to certain kinds of problems because they committed to some very specific trade-offs.
But, these same trade-offs have far-reaching implications for the language semantics, so you can't just use macros to graft them on after the fact. You can embed a mini-Prolog in Lisp, sure, but adding fully native logic variables (as in Prolog or Oz) would be far from trivial.