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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1969 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 31, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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The thing that blew my mind when learning programming was that functions could be held in variables. Like this is a perfectly valid (if bad) chunk of code:

def multiply(A, B):
    return A * B

def add(A, B):
    return A + B

def doMath(operation, A, B):
    return operation(A, B)

doMath(multiply, 3, 4)

It blew my mind when I first learned about it too!

In some sense this is the same sort of mental gestalt shift that is at the basis of all scientific thought, and is therefore a useful experience for everyone to undergo.

What if a function were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of operations, you can pass it around, access its properties, etc.

What if the human mind/body were an object just like any other, and therefore subject to all the same sorts of physical laws, etc.

It's one of those things which is really useful when you need it, though it can be hard to spot the utility when you are first learning. When I learned about functions as data in college I asked the professor why you would ever need to use that technique (and which, shame on him, he couldn't answer). But I've since found it to be absolutely clutch even if not something you use 90% of the time.

It's especially useful when you're writing reusable framework code, e.g. your UI library will probably have something like register_callback(Function f, Widget w) so you can perform action f whenever button w is clicked. But if you're just writing "app" code as opposed to "framework" code it may not come up as often.

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