It is difficult to learn if you're only used to programming in an imperative style, but it's worth persevering. I sometimes found that some bits only really made sense to me if I skipped over the chapter, saw how it was used in practice, and then came back for the explanation.

As for not using it - I rarely programme in an entirely functional style, but I learned a huge amount from HOP that I find incredibly useful every day, both in my fun-time programming and at work. There are some problems where it's really useful to be able to construct functions on the fly which are variations on a template, and to throw functions around as data. Sure, you can always find other ways of doing it, but the functional way is easier to read and debug.

In reply to Re^5: How to understand chapter 6 of Higher Order Perl? by DrHyde
in thread How to understand chapter 6 of Higher Order Perl? by Anonymous Monk

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