Wadler's critique of SICP (1987)

Re:Wadler's critique of SICP (1987) by PurplePanda on Thursday August 04, 2011 @05:48AM (#2845274)

See chapter 1.3 of SICP. It talks about the motivation and usage of higher order abstractions in general, and also about fold specifically, which they call 'accumulate'.

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Re:Wadler's critique of SICP (1987) by akkartik on Thursday August 04, 2011 @12:41PM (#2846666)

Ah yes, thanks, we discussed it several times over on the arc forum (e.g. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10791)

I was asking more about code in the wild that uses accumulate instead of the naive recursive formulation. That's typically what we mean by idiomatic.

I see foldl often in haskell, but rarely in scheme. I'm not disagreeing that it's a great idea, just that this is how it 'would have been written'. Personally I find the naive recursive formulation plenty clear.

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