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>It’s pretty well known that Guido van Rossum isn’t big on functional programming. Python tries pretty hard to make functional programming painful, to a degree

>It’s pretty well known that Guido van Rossum isn’t big on functional programming. Python tries pretty hard to make functional programming painful, to a degree that seems rather extreme, given how simple the fixes for the pain points would be. >Python has lambdas, but they’re seriously hamstrung: They can only be a single expression. No statements. Furthermore, Python has a bunch of built-in language features that are totally obviated by adding a decent syntax for multi-statement lambdas. This guy doesn't understand functional programming and why the lambda exists as a single expression. Either way I agree it's better to have multiline lambdas but I disagree with how he related it to Guido making functional programming painful... If lambdas had multiline statements then the lambda would not be following the functional paradigm. In functional programming EVERY function is a single expression, including the main itself. In fact, in functional programming, your Entire program is just a single expression.

zenhack 9y ago
> In functional programming EVERY function is a single expression, including the main itself. In fact, in functional programming, your Entire program is just a single expression. This is a technicality. There's basically always a mechanism for chaining two expressions and junking the result of the first. In OCaml, the semicolon operator does this. In Scheme (and most lisps) you can just put multiple expressions in the body of the function, and the return value will be the last one. And there's `begin` if you want a block that's not a function. In Haskell, the purity makes this actually not make sense in most contexts, but you've got `(>>)` for monads, and the do-notation which sugars it into something that looks basically like a statement. Some version of that in python would be an acceptable alternative. But there's also stuff like moving reduce to a separate package.

zenhack 9y ago

> In functional programming EVERY function is a single expression, including the main itself. In fact, in functional programming, your Entire program is just a single expression. This is a technicality. There's basically always a mechanism for chaining two expressions and junking the result of the first. In OCaml, the semicolon operator does this. In Scheme (and most lisps) you can just put multiple expressions in the body of the function, and the return value will be the last one. And there's `begin` if you want a block that's not a function. In Haskell, the purity makes this actually not make sense in most contexts, but you've got `(>>)` for monads, and the do-notation which sugars it into something that looks basically like a statement. Some version of that in python would be an acceptable alternative. But there's also stuff like moving reduce to a separate package.