Currying and Partial Function Evaluation

Old. But still interesting.

Partial Function Application is not Currying

It seems like hair-splitting. However, the distinction between bound variables and curried functions does have some practical implications.

I'm looking closely at PyMonad and the built-in functools library.

I'm finding some benefits in understanding functional programming and how to apply functional design patterns in Python. I'm also seeing the important differences between compiled -- and optimized languages -- and Python's approach. I'm slowly coming to understand how a (simple) recursive design is flattened into a for loop as part of manual tail-recursion optimization.

The functional programming goodness is giving me first-class headaches when trying to apply the lessons learned to Java, however. I suppose I should look closely at http://www.functionaljava.org and https://code.google.com/p/functionaljava/. There are claims that it's dangerously inefficient. Also, the customer who insists on Java has a (very) limited set of allowed libraries; if this isn't on the list, then the whole concept is a non-starter.