A critic of Guido's blog on Python's lambda

[Chris Uppal]

Pisin Bootvong wrote:

> Slippery Slope::
>        "Argumentation that A is bad, because A might lead to B, and B
> to C, and we all know C is very bad."

For the Slippery Slope criticism to be applicable, there would have to be some
suggestion that removing anonymous functions /would actually/ (tend to) lead to
removing anonymous values in general.  There was no such suggestion.

The form of the argument was more like reasoning by analogy: if context A has
features like context B, and in B some feature is known to be good (bad) then
the analogous feature in A is also good (bad).  In that case an attack on the
validity of the argument would centre on the relevance and accuracy of the
analogy.

Alternatively the argument might be seen as a generalisation/specialisation
approach.  Functions are special cases of the more general notion of values.
We all agree that anonymous values are a good thing, so anonymous functions
should be too.  If you parse the argument like that, then the attack should
centre on showing that functions have relevant special features which are not
shared by values in general, and so that we cannot validly deduce that
anonymous functions are good.

    -- chris