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Comment by efnx | Hacker News Reader

Not being able to pass functions as values is a show stopper - it's arguably the single most important tenet of functional languages.

i believe she was talking specifically about `foo(bar(baz(X)))` and not passing functions themselves as arguments

*she

When in doubt, 'they' is a safe bet too.

Ahh - that makes more sense. Still, this practice wouldn't make much sense for the ML family of languages.

I understand her point to be about passing called functions. Surely passing functions as values (partials, etc) is fine?

  final_function(maybe_function(X))

  final_function(maybe_function)(x)

Disclaimer, not familiar with Erlang syntax, so the above example is psuedo-code.

"If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program." --Linus

Right, you can pass a function:

final_function(fun() -> maybe_function(X) end)

final_function(maybe_function, X)

if final_function does:

final_function(Function, X) -> Function(X).

Small thing, but `final_function` here needs to be passed `fun maybe_function/1`, not the atom `maybe_function` alone.

Oops, yup. Meant to make it explicit since you can also do: ?MODULE:Function(X)

You can pass functions. The article was saying not to nest function calls.

You can't, where? You mean in general in some functional languages?

Sorry I don't see how your comment fits with the gp's comment.