HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ dmvaldman

This video (similar lecture, different audience) has the slides alongside the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs

Still one of the best programming talks I've ever seen.

That is a nice description of how to arrive at the Y-combinator.

There was a talk using similar examples which I think is very educational.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Y-Combinator

I wrote down the examples used in the video (given the poor quality of video) to help myself learn about the Y-Combinator

https://gist.github.com/gdevanla/9171085

Recently, I presented this topic to my team and wrote down a Python equivalent of this example.

https://gist.github.com/gdevanla/07a08d99e183f494d036c6d6fe6...

⬐ pimeys

Do you always need some lazy evaluation to arrive at the Y-combinator? It seems that even for the strict example a lambda was used to hold the recursive call evaluating too early.

Well, anyways, these are very interesting ideas to study and opened up some of the reasoning behind Haskell's laziness for me.

⬐ grdvnl

It doesn't have to be. The stricter version is called 'applicative-order' Y-combinator. The article talks about both versions as well.

Was it the one from 2012? The video is available on infoq.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Y-Combinator

⬐ StefanKarpinski

Sorry, yes, it was 2012.

Nice, I enjoyed Jim's talk where he derived the combinator using clojure[1]. In it he referenced another talk that he cites as an influence, "Programming With Nothing"[2] by Tom Stuart where he writes fizzbuzz in ruby using only lambda application.

Finding the SKI calculus was a similar revelation to me, that such simple combinators could represent any lambda term is such a huge idea!

1: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Y-Combinator

2: http://rubymanor.org/3/videos/programming_with_nothing/

⬐ sgrove

One of the best, and certainly most entertaining, explanations and examples of the Y-combinator. I didn't expect much going in, but I was definitely blown away by the quality and understandable nature. Please give it a go, it's a lot of fun!