>Let's talk about this fabled exchange between Norvig and McCarthy, where McCarthy asks if Python can gracefully manipulate code as data, and Norvig said no, and supposedly a thousand words were said in the ensuing silence.
The difference is that when you can do it gracefully, you'll end up doing it and using this possibility to build your project. If you can't do it gracefully, you'll dread using it and will not consider it a possible solution to your problem unless all other options are exhausted.
Well, the key part is gracefully. Lots of languages can manipulate code as data, but so for for me only in homoiconic languages does it end up feeling graceful for a while (although as I noted, it stops feeling graceful pretty quickly).
Python has this: https://docs.python.org/2/library/ast.html so it is possible to manipulate code as data. It just happens that it's not homoiconic, but so what?