The Constitutional Peasants
Carol is toiling in the bits when a developer rides up on a horse made of compiled JavaScript.
“I am Bob, King of the Functions! I bring three function forms: declarations, expressions, and arrows!”
Carol does not look up from her lambda calculus. “Well I didn’t vote for for them.”
“You don’t vote for function forms.”
“Well how’d they become three function forms then?”
“The ECMAScript committee, their specification writ in the purest shimmering prose of twenty-six years of backward compatibility, raised the function keyword aloft from the bosom of the grammar, signifying by divine providence that I, Bob, was to carry three forms—”
“Listen. Strange committees sitting in ECMA offices distributing keywords is no basis for a system of abstraction. Supreme computational power derives from a mandate from the lambda calculus, not from some farcical standardization ceremony.”
“Be quiet!”
“You can’t expect to wield supreme expressive power just because some Swiss standards body threw a keyword at you!”
A passing Lykn developer clears her throat. “We have two forms.”
“’lo, Alice.”
“Be quiet!”
“’lo, Carol.”
“We’ve got func for named functions. fn for anonymous ones.”
“I ORDER YOU to BE QUIET!”
“Order, eh? Who does he think he is? As I was saying, both require typed parameters. Neither has this.”
Carol considers this. “Well, it’s better than what he’s got.”