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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

Here's a challenge for you: what syntax would be better? I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I think you are right that the syntax (being very foreign to people) does provide an impediment, but puzzling out how to implement the same functionality with a more familiar syntax would be extremely difficult (though potentially very fun).

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Redux follows the same pattern with your more "familiar" syntax.

Typed functional programming offers wins that forces more safety and modularity onto the code. These are all long term wins. Ultimately I would argue that elm's syntax is better suited for extremely complex projects that have low tolerance for bugs.

Redux is a javascript library. It shares some idioms with correct Elm code, but is a very different beast.

Right but the underlying design pattern is the same. This is all I'm saying. Redux can almost be thought of as an Elm pattern implementation with "familiar" imperative syntax.

Well, something like C-like, for maximum familiarity.

What functionality is difficult to render in C-like syntax?

Currying

I can get the same effect as currying with C syntax by deliberating invoking a special function:

    functools.partial(old_function, my_new_argument)

Is this such a useful thing that you need the functional style syntax to make it even easier to do?

Yes

You can do it in Python as you have, but it becomes second nature with Haskell (I can't speak to Elm directly). You might not even realize you're doing it.

Add 5 to each num in a list (using a pretend function called `add` in both languages to be fair):

  map(functools.partial(add, 5), nums)

  map (add 5) nums

Add 5 to each in a list of list of numbers:

  map(functools.partial(map, functools.partial(add, 5)), nums)

  map (map (add 5)) nums

I suppose it would make more sense to write these as lambdas in a c style syntax

   nums.map(|sublist| sublist.map(|num| add(num, 5))

Maybe I haven't done enough functional programming yet, but I still like the explicitness of the C-style over the functional style.

Sorry, but there is nothing more explicit about using lambdas as you have done, it's simply redundant (notice the repetition of sublist and num arguments).

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