On 24 Jan 2008, at 3:04 PM, Evan Laforge wrote:
This takes an iterator over some collection of Foos and finds the one with the highest value of updateTime. 9 lines of code, or 12 with the closing curly brackets.
In Haskell this is so short and obvious you probably wouldn't bother declaring it as a function, but if you did, here it is:
-- Find the Foo that was most recently updated. latestUpdate :: [Foo] -> Foo latestUpdate foos = maximumBy (comparing updateTime) foos
Of course you could always write it in point-free format, but I think that would be over-egging things.
Java's just wordy like that. In python you'd say max(foos, key=lambda x: x.update_time). Python / perl / ruby / smalltalk have had first class functions forever, so those are basically already in the mainstream.
But, while Python/Perl/Ruby/Smalltalk may have borrowed such techniques already, the syntax still conspires against them. If the audience knows one or more of these languages, I would suggest finding its syntactic infelicities and contrasting with Haskell (Haskell's syntax is its strongest point, IMHO). jcc