November 2010
Intermediate to advanced
504 pages
12h 45m
English
Content preview from Land of LispBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Why lambda Is So Important
The ability to pass around functions as if they were just plain old pieces of data is incredibly valuable. Once you get used to doing this, you open up all kinds of conceptual possibilities in the design of your programs. Eventually, your programs will start looking very different from programs in more (dare I say) pedestrian languages, such as Java or C. The name for the style of programming that relies heavily on passing functions as values is called higher-order functional programming. We will look at this style in more detail in Chapter 14.
An even more important reason why Lispers go gaga over lambda is that, as it turns out, in a purely mathematical sense, lambda is actually the only Lisp command there is!
Recall ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.