a +b ?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:05:56 -0700, alex23 wrote:

> And I'm saying that I hope that most people who are professional
> developers are capable of learning such advanced functionality, which
> they will never do if there are no effective examples for them from
> which to learn. I'm not sure why Python's handling of functions is seen
> as any more complex than the way it treats everything as first- class
> objects. I fear that not encouraging people to explore this aspect does
> limit the language's power for them somewhat.

In my experience, some functional tools are truly mind-blowing (at least 
they blow *my* mind) but there's nothing difficult about map and reduce. 
Some people don't like them, and even seem to fear reduce -- I don't get 
that myself, but there you go. However, the first step in understanding 
them is to understand that you can use functions as data, and -- again, 
this is my experience -- some newcomers to programming have great 
difficulty going from this idiom:


code = condition(x)
if code == 0:
    return functionA(x)
if code == 1:
    return functionB(x)
if code == 2:
    return functionC(x)


to this first-class function idiom:


dispatch_table = {0: functionA, 1: functionB, 2: functionC}
code = condition(x)
return dispatch[code](x)


and from that I surmise that they probably would have problems with other 
functional forms, such as map, at least at first. Your mileage may vary.


> From both Ben & your posts I'm worried that I'm being seen as having
> contempt for (at least certain classes of) other developers, when it's
> really intended as the contrary.

No implication of contempt was meant. I don't think it's contemptuous to 
assume that people will all meet a certain minimum level of experience, 
knowledge and general programming skill. Unrealistic, perhaps, but not 
contemptuous *grin*



-- 
Steven