[syrak]

> It's not clear to me that it has any use at all if you don't have higher-order functions.

The very origin of defunctionalization is to emulate higher-order functions in a language without them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defunctionalization

> defunctionalization refers to a compile-time transformation which eliminates higher-order functions, replacing them by a single first-order apply function.

[samatman]

The author has indicated that this blog post was an internal communique which escaped confinement, so this isn't intended as criticism:

For a general audience, linking the first instance of the string "defunctionalization" to this Wikipedia article would help people get up to speed. I'm not embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of it, and as a consequence I'm learning more from the Wiki than I learned from the Fine Article.

[Smaug123]

It didn't exactly escape confinement; rather, I originally wrote much of this content for internal purposes and then realised it would be good to publish it externally.

True, since I linked "closure" I should probably have linked the main topic of the article. Honestly, though, I'm not sure the Wikipedia article is very comprehensible at all; I'm hoping mine is more so.

[samatman]

It's not a great Wikipedia entry, agreed.

I was left wondering if the topic is inherently that difficult or if this is just another case of le Wik being kinda dense for maths and comp sci. Looking around a bit at other links in this thread, I'm gathering it's the latter.