Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhrgunatha | Hacker News Reader

You decompose the complex task into separate other tasks and compose them together the same way that you would in any other paradigm. You wouldn't expect to express a complex task in a single line in an OO program for example.

documents = filter(pdf, folder)

summaries = map(summarise_document, documents)

Is pretty clear despite summarising a document being a complex task.

View on HN

I appreciate how nice the functional style is, but sometimes a for loop acting over a few local variables is simpler to read than a bunch of map's and lambdas. Does this look readable and nicer to you than a for loop?

    print pipeline_each(bands, [call(lambda x: 'Canada', 'country'),
                                call(lambda x: x.replace('.', ''), 'name'),
                                call(str.title, 'name'),
                                extract_name_and_country]

Sometimes it's easier to implement directly what you want done than to remember the name of the function that plucks a field from a list of records or something like that.

You seem to be obsessed with this idea that "functional programming" is a fancy term for squishing your entire program onto one line via gratuitous use of anonymous functions, which simply isn't true. I don't know what this snippet of code is supposed to do, and it's not very pretty, but guess what: it is just as easy to produce unreadable garbage in an "imperative style". I've seen a lot of both, but more of the latter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com