Would Anonymous Functions Help in Learning Programming/Python?

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:52:41 -0400, Carl Banks wrote:

> First of all, let me say that I think "functions as first class data" is 
> helpful, but not crucial, to programming in Python, and there are many 
> people who simply don't need the lesson.  Especially someone like an 
> engineer (in the classical sense), who isn't building versatile software 
> packages, won't need to resort to functional programming much.

Of course you don't *need* functional programming as in "there's no way
around it", but why are engineers such an exception!?  I find the stuff in
`itertools` very handy when it comes to filter, manipulate, group and
aggregate data from large log files in ad hoc scripts.  I'm not an
engineer but I guess there are similar tasks with log files or measurement
results.

> For straightforward tasks, like sorting lists with a custom ordering, 
> functional progamming merely a convenience, and can be done without.

``for`` loops are just a convenience, you can do without.  ;-)

Ciao,
	Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch