You aren't speaking to the principal point in the post Peaker links, which is accepted by Harper in the notes "As you know, in the eager world we tend to write

You aren't speaking to the principal point in the post Peaker links, which is accepted by Harper in the notes "As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators", which is of course all any anyone cares about; with explicit recursion the user's IQ falls 50 points immediately. The whole discussion presupposes a mechanism for 'opting out' of default strictness or default laziness, which exists in many languages.