There is a huge difference between giving away a year-old product and giving away a brand new, never-been-sold-before one.

Let me explain.

Radiohead took a -huge- risk by releasing an album, out the door, right at the start, with a "pay what you want" pricing model.

2dboy is taking -no- risk by releasing World of Goo with a "pay what you want" pricing model. They are already on the tail end of the demand curve at the $20 price point, they are just using this as a chance to capture more of the market at a smaller price.

Radiohead took a huge swing with their pricing model, 2dboy didn't. It's a completely different situation.

I posted this there, but I feel more people prefer to read comments here.

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First, I love both Python and Clojure, and completely agree that Clojure is more functional and aimed towards concurrency (this was its goal, after all). But I feel like you're doing Python wrong here.

> I think this should make a Pythonist a little jealous

No, I think you misunderstood the whitespace rules for Python. First, it isn't set to "4 spaces", it just has to be uniform. You could use 8 tabs if you wanted, or 2 spaces, or 7 spaces. Also, inside of data structures, strings, function calls, etc you can go whitespace crazy. This is valid Python:

    users = (# name ,      id,    age,     phone
             ("Frank",     200,    22,     "555-1234"),
             ("Johnathan", 201,    24,     "555-3213"),
             ("Peter ",    202,   101,     "555-2312"))

> The last print statement outputs "10" which is surprising to me, since y has never been declared in that given scope.

But it wasn't declared in that scope, there is no scope for 'if'. It may not be what you're used to but you can't blame Python for your assumption of what should have it's own scope or not.

> To resolve it you have to manually call 'del y'

What do you mean to resolve it? Why are you deleting the reference at all? You very rarely see 'del' in real Python code.

> but I can't count the number of C app's that have suffered from memory-leaks and what not, based on the lack of automated garbage collection

What does that have to do with Python? It is reference counted, those values will be deleted when they go out of all scopes, just like in Clojure.

> But this is very different from Clojures concept where immutable means: 'x' never changes.

That isn't what it means in Clojure at all.

    user=> (def x 1)
    #'user/x
    user=> x
    1
    user=> (def x 5)
    #'user/x
    user=> x
    5

I just changed 'x'. What immutability means is that the value 'x' points to does not change. And that's exactly what it means in Python, too, but dictionaries are mutable (and this is documented). For example, strings in Python are immutable, just as in Clojure. If two things reference the same string and one "changes" it only means that it references a wholly new string.

> Guido is not preparing to transition into modern programming

That's a little extreme. Concurrent programming is valuable, but there will also be many programs that fit single process / thread models very well until the end of time.