Re: Express What, not How.

From: james anderson (james.anderson_at_setf.de)
Date: 10/15/03 

Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:07:17 +0200

ketil+news@ii.uib.no wrote:
>
> james anderson <james.anderson@setf.de> writes:
>
> > i have no argument with the utility of lambda abstractions. i am
> > trying only to understand the implications of an argument which, at
> > least as stated, rather unequivocally deprecates bindings. the
> > position which was proposed in the forgoing post was rather extreme.
>
> You mean this position?
>
> | A program should balance named and unnamed objects. Both are useful,
> | there is a continuum between cases where one or the other is more clear
>

no i did not mean that position.

> I have a hard time interpreting this as extremist. Perhaps you should
> re-read what you are replying to?

i did. i also read the post he purported to be replying to. and observed that
there is no need to overstate some elses position in order to, in the end,
make the same point.

the last paragraph, which you site above, stand in strange contrast to the
remainder of the post.

>
> I'm rather baffled that anybody would argue against this,

i'm rather baffled that anybody would think i did. i did not argue against
that last paragraph, but against the rhetoric in the preceeding text.

> to me too,
> it is perfectly natural to use anonymous functions in exression,
> whether manifest as a lamda expressions, compositions of functions,
> combinators or partial applications (are there more?).
>
> To me, this is the same argument as that against excessive comments,
> overly verbose identifiers or annotations (like Hungarian notation) -
> if the code is short and clear enough, it only detracts from
> readability, and, at worst, becomes misleading or wrong. If the code
> isn't clear enough, it should be rewritten.

...

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