Express What, not How.

[james anderson]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 22:09:44 +0000, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
> 
> > A theme of this whole thread is the difference between writing _what_
> > something does, and _how_ it does it. The higher up the ladder of
> > abstraction we go, the more we want to express _what_ is being done. We
> > leave the _how_ defined elsewhere, to be consulted only as needed.
> 
> Sometimes a function is so simple that its body is more clear than any
> name. ... Function headers are administrative
> stuff, it's harder to find real code among abstractions being introduced
> and used.
> 
> Why do you insist on naming *functions*? ... It's
> all equally absurd.

years and years ago, perchance, the same person who introduced me to
referential transparency also went to great lengths to acquaint me with the
benefits of internal define.

> 
> 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
> and it's subjective in border cases, but there is place for unnamed
> functions - they are not that special. Most high level languages have
> anonymous functions for a reason.
> 

please post the longest lambda calculus definition which you would like to
point to as an exemplar of coding clarity - an exercise, publication,
production code, whatever. i'm just wondering if you're serious about all of this.

...