On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 6:52 PM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote: > If the current page doesn't reflect the community consensus, or someone's > specific position, please feel free to change it. It's not "my page". > We'll probably converge on a better result, faster, by collaborating on the > Wiki than by going back-and-forth via email on the Forums. If we can't come > to terms on certain ideas, we can separate them from the direct response to > Graham's challenge and discuss them in a separate section.
I am sad to see that Boyko has departed the forums. Yes, he seemed to want to turn every conversation I had with him into a conversation about me instead of about the issues I was trying to discuss (but the programming forum is not the right place for that kind of discussion). But he had the energy to pursue these discussions and on re-reading his material I could sometimes glean his points. Here, my current understanding of his point (which I believe he would disagree with - I do not remember him ever agreeing with me) would be that "functional programming" is really something like what we have in other contexts here called "function level programming", and that "purely functional" programming is a constraint on that concept. And, since closures are built on this definition of function, I think his way of expressing this idea would be that there are closures and there are purely functional closures (closures with the same constraints that we have for purely functional programming and/or purely functional programming languages). Anyways, I'll try to digest that (and maybe review his text in this thread to see whether I can spot any inconsistencies that make me uncomfortable) and wait a time to see if anyone else chimes in. And, maybe I'll tackle updating the wiki to reflect this issue. On a side note, since the wiki we use does not support factoring a page into "content on the page" and "discussion about that page" as independent contexts, we have a tension between the two. I think that in the long run our use of the wiki should sacrifice discussion for content unless we have made a point to label the page as "discussion". Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
