> Writing functions that receive other functions as input can lead to over complicated code that's really hard to read.
Although your opinion is more extreme than I can get behind, I don't entirely disagree. I find monads and applicative functors are far easier to understand when presented in their non-higher-order formulation -- that is, "flatten" instead of "bind", and "merge" instead of "ap". You still need to understand "map", but that's an incredibly common pattern that you can get a lot out of for putting in just a little.
I wrote a little comment on this earlier this week.
I also agree with your opinion elsewhere about preferring combinators instead of directly passing higher-order functions, but I suspect that's much more of a style and design issue than a language feature distinction. You still need higher-order functions (and I'm frustrated weekly by Java's lack of higher-kinded types or pleasant existential types) as the basement layer to expose a beautiful API in more natural terms.
Although your opinion is more extreme than I can get behind, I don't entirely disagree. I find monads and applicative functors are far easier to understand when presented in their non-higher-order formulation -- that is, "flatten" instead of "bind", and "merge" instead of "ap". You still need to understand "map", but that's an incredibly common pattern that you can get a lot out of for putting in just a little.
I wrote a little comment on this earlier this week.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894849
I also agree with your opinion elsewhere about preferring combinators instead of directly passing higher-order functions, but I suspect that's much more of a style and design issue than a language feature distinction. You still need higher-order functions (and I'm frustrated weekly by Java's lack of higher-kinded types or pleasant existential types) as the basement layer to expose a beautiful API in more natural terms.