Introduction

Once of the more interesting features that has been added to most object-oriented languages over time is lambda expressions. Lambda expressions are a unique way to handle functions in our code - basically, we can create a function on the fly, and then pass that function around as a parameter or store it in a variable, just like any other object. In true Von Neumann fashion, we are effectively treating the executable code of our program just like data.

In this chapter, we’ll briefly explore lambda expressions and where they came from. We’ll see some examples of how they are used in both Java and Python, and then we’ll discuss some best practices for when we should, or should not, consider using them in our code.

In this course, we generally won’t need to use lambda expressions in our programs except in a few cases, such as specific types of unit tests in Java. This chapter is meant to simply be informative and let you explore one interesting aspect of programming you may not have worked with up to this point.