Do lambda expressions have any use other than saving lines of code?

Question

Do lambda expressions have any use other than saving lines of code?

Are there any special features provided by lambdas which solved problems which weren\'t easy to s

Answer 1

Programming languages are not for machines to execute.

They are for programmers to think in.

Languages are a conversation with a compiler to turn our thoughts into something a machine can execute. One of the chief complaints about Java from people who come to it from other languages (or leave it for other languages) used to be that it forces a certain mental model on the programmer (i.e. everything is a class).

I'm not going to weigh in on whether that's good or bad: everything is trade-offs. But Java 8 lambdas allow programmers to think in terms of functions, which is something you previously could not do in Java.

It's the same thing as a procedural programmer learning to think in terms of classes when they come to Java: you see them gradually move from classes that are glorified structs and have 'helper' classes with a bunch of static methods and move on to something that more closely resembles a rational OO design (mea culpa).

If you just think of them as a shorter way to express anonymous inner classes then you are probably not going to find them very impressive in the same way that the procedural programmer above probably didn't think classes were any great improvement.