[PRL] Of course our programming language can do this

[Doug Orleans]

Dave Herman writes:
 > > I just realized another bit of irony about this post: his examples are
 > > written in ECMAScript, which is, of course, an object-oriented
 > > programming language.  In particular,
 > 
 > There's nothing ironic about that. His point stands without claiming 
 > that object-oriented and functional programming are mutually exclusive. 
 > ECMAScript in fact happily mixes the two.

His point seems to be "ECMAScript has higher-order functions, which
are cool.  You can't do that in your stodgy old Object-Oriented
language!"  This post (and especially Steve Yegge's "Kingdom of Nouns"
rant) seem to think that this is a fundamental distinction, but to me
it's just a small matter of syntax.

 > Not really. The lambda form closes over its lexical environment. The 
 > reflective form doesn't.

You're right, sorry.  I've only just started to learn ECMAScript in
the past week or so.

 > > the main reason ECMAScript wins over Java (by Spolsky's measure) is
 > > that it has this syntactic sugar to make function expressions simpler.
 > 
 > Well, yes, that's the whole point. You can implement the same things in 
 > Java, but it's painful. In ECMAScript it's not nearly as painful because 
 > of constructs like higher-order functions.

I don't think it's as painful in Java as Spolsky makes it sound.  And
I don't think he thinks the whole point is the lack of syntactic sugar
in Java, but that there's a fundamental difference between objects and
functions.  But I'm no expert on what Spolsky thinks, I've only read
the few things that Mitch has forwarded to PRL...

 > > Now if only Java had macros...  http://jse.sourceforge.net/
 > 
 > If it ever does, let's hope it's not JSE. Notice the TO-DO page:
 > 
 >      http://jse.sourceforge.net/doc/todo.html
 > 
 > Under "Macros" it includes the to-do item "implement hygiene." This page 
 > has not been updated since around when the original paper was written, 
 > five years ago.

Yeah, that was more a wistful "whatever happened to this idea".  I'm
not really sure why no one else has seriously tried to do macros in
Java.  (Is hygiene really the hard part?)

--dougorleans at gmail.com