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A comment on From Imperative to Functional: how to make the leap. Parent comment

Re:From Imperative to Functional: how to make the leap by kyllo on Monday February 25, 2013 @11:48AM (#5279869)
Lisp and Ruby, among other languages, actually use the word 'lambda' as a keyword for declaring an anonymous function. It's more typing than "\", but the intent is clear.

I don't think Haskell is really the best choice of language for demonstrating these FP concepts simply because Haskell's syntax is a little cryptic to those who haven't studied it. Lisp would have been a more readable choice since the syntax is trivial.

Also, you didn't touch on recursion, which is a key concept in FP. The idea of having a function call itself repeatedly in order to loop through a data structure, instead of iterating over the data structure by mutating a counter variable, is a huge paradigm shift for people who are new to FP.

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Re:From Imperative to Functional: how to make the leap by eru on Wednesday February 27, 2013 @11:09AM (#5293035)
Yes. But in practice we almost never recurse through a data structure directly. We once recursively define a combinator to fold the datastructure, and then always use that combinator for working with the data structure.
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