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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

I think I like the explicit lambda better; I prefer to be judicious with syntactic sugar and special variable names.

    fun x => add(subtract(x, 2), 3) // Virgil

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Coming from Scala to Kotlin, this is what I thought as well. Seeing `it` felt very wrong, then I got used to it.

I don't mind adopting features from popular languages. (After all, Virgil using _ for partial application turned out to be a happy accident that aligned with Scala.) Adopting features that are popping up in other languages helps to reduce the explanation burden, but I'm not sure on this one. It took me about 10 years to finally settle on having `fun` as a keyword to introduce lambdas instead of the parser back-tracking madness that JS parsers do.

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