Gleam is really a delightful language with great ideas, but the lack of currying is a tragedy.

Missing currying feels a little to me like walking in FP land with one leg cut off.

▲ kaoD 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I never liked currying. It feels more theoretically elegant than practically useful.

IMO it is hard to read (unless you're very familiar with the functions at hand), produces type errors that are not easy to follow (oops, I forgot the last arg), and is too rigid (I often need to partially apply arguments in non left-to-right order).

I never understood why partial application via "slots" isn't more common though (I just made up the term, not sure if this has a name). Like Clojure's:

    #(f %2 "foo" %1 "bar")
    ;; same as
    (fn [a b] (f b "foo" a "bar"))

Does Gleam have something like that?

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nchagnet 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes Gleam allows you to do f(arg, _)

See the relevant docs: https://tour.gleam.run/everything/#functions-function-captur...

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riffraff an hour ago | parent [-]

But that's a single argument right?

Seems more limiting than the closure way. Scala allows multiple _ but in turn that doesn't allow changing ordering.

TBH, I feel this stuff is not really worth it,

	▲	yladiz 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think the single hole version is a good compromise compared to actual currying or multiple holes, since it's strictly better than something like first or last argument threading (e.g. ->, ->> in Clojure), easier to reason about than currying, and in my experience most of the time you'll only be dealing with one argument to pass piping anyway. Anonymous functions are fine for the cases you need more flexibility.

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senderista 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are there any physicists out there who are reminded of abstract index notation for tensors?

▲ stiiv 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A deal breaker, and just when I was starting to get excited!

Plenty of practical reasons for currying, but the biggest (imo) is for use with the pipe operator.

If they don't have partial application now, what are the odds they'll have it in the future?

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nchagnet 8 hours ago | parent [-]

As I mentioned in my other comment, they do have partial application with _, and it works like a charm for piping! It's automatic currying which is absent.

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senderista 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And that's fine, because currying forces you into impossible tradeoffs when choosing argument order.

	▲	adamddev1 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But Haskell has nice little functions for switching argument order, and people can easily make them in other currying languages.