Ruby Conf 12 - Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich

Jim Weirich's "Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming"[1] is perhaps the most entertaining and interesting technical talk I've ever seen. It would absolutely not be as cool or as fun without the live coding. Additionally, the incremental process by which he arrives at the conclusion makes the topic much more approachable. 1. ▶ this video

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▶ this video This talk is a must-see, really shows off Jim Weirich's craft and overall ability to be a great pedagogue.

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If you are curious about the topic, I strongly recommend watching these videos: Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich ▶ this video Programming with Nothing by Tom Stuart [link]

in “What is a y-combinator? (2008)” · View on HN

Well, .NET's garbage collector certainly springs to mind. Not exactly in a good way. You know you have something special on your hands when GitHub refuses to show you a highlighted version of a hand written C++ file ( [link] ). Other than that, I remember my mind was blown a few times while watching Jim Weirich's presentation on functional programming all those years ago ( ▶ this video ).

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A good video that made it click for me is the following, which derives the ycombinator from 1st principles: ▶ this video

in “An intriguing discovery of Computer Science: The Y combinator [video]” · View on HN

Here is a good one that come to mind: 1. This one is alive demo where the speaker derives the Y Combinator from first principles. A really interesting exposition of functional programming at its finest. Link: ▶ this video

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Jim Weirich's 2012 Ruby Conf talk is also a great introduction to the Y Combinator and Lambda Calculus. ▶ this video

in “Deriving the Y Combinator in JavaScript” · View on HN

Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich ▶ this video The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing by Cory Doctorow [link] Cybersecurity as Realpolitik by Dan Geer [link] [link]

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I mean, sure, it's going to be turtles the whole way down if you're looking to define the universe without resorting to physical quantities (that is, dimensioned units). We don't have anything like a Grand Unified Theory yet, wherein we define Physics by means of some elemental mathematics (in the form that we can bootstrap computation from lambda calculus via things like the Y Combinator [0]). Besides, we occasionally give dimensional names to dimensionless quantities (my favorite being the engineering unit the inverse radian) [1]. It's a useful abstraction, and it seems confusing to complain about it. So we resort to what we know, which is what we see. We can't see more than the surrounding universe, but we can try extrapolating from what seems to work. Attempting to stifle that inquiry seems a bit... I dunno, pointlessly antagonistic. This article shows science in action, doing what it does best: taking observations and reconciling them with other observations via theory, and then fixing theory to match. It seems our universe follows certain equations which are themselves dimensionful, so I'm not sure why we wouldn't attempt to benchmark the universe against itself - we don't have much else to use. Even dimensionless numbers are only marginally useful, like alpha; it may "exist" and manifest as our universe, but it's not especially predictive. [0] ▶ this video (one of my favorite videos - I still don't grok it, but I'm getting closer!) [1] [link]

in “Excitement Over Gravity Waves Comes Crashing Down” · View on HN

Since it is not readme based, I suggest including Y-Not[1] - an excellent talk about functional programming and lambda calculus [1]: ▶ this video

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+1 on the lambda calculus stuff. Here's a related talk about deriving the Y combinator in Ruby by Jim Weirich: ▶ this video (skip to about 28:00 if you're impatient) There are additional versions of this same presentation circulating with the code in Javascript and (I believe) Clojure. Full disclosure: Jim is a co-worker of mine.

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Jim Weirich derives the Y combinator in pure Ruby here: [link] EDIT: Correct video ▶ this video It is some of the ugliest ruby code I have ever seen, but it was something amazing to watch happen live.

in “Three Little Birds – Deriving the Y Combinator” · View on HN

Reading this, I was struck by how it reminded me of a talk that slowly warped and wrapped a statement to build up the Y-combinator. The process takes a self-referential function and slowly works the self out of it. Honestly, I'm not at all sure turning a function anonymous is actually similar to making a sentence passive, but maybe re-watching that video now I'll have that je ne sais quoi that'll let me actually grok the process. [0] ▶ this video

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Confreaks.com seems to be having some troubles, I'm guessing this is the same talk: Ruby Conf 12 - Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich (uploaded by Confreaks): ▶ this video

in “Y Not – Adventures in Functional Programming (2012)” · View on HN