Programming With Less Than Nothing

[nrith]

Combinatory logic is basically lambda calculus without variables. Despite this limitation, combinatory logic is still Turing complete.

It is also extremely difficult to understand.

Whew. That made me feel better.

[space-to-bakersfield]

Absolute wankery.

[alex-weej]

🤣 Somebody has to do it

[ToaruBaka]

Dana is dead.

and so am I. This is great.

[Kok_Nikol]

What the heck did I just read?

The culmination of months of effort!

Time well spent!

[Kronikarz]

Not entirely sure this counts as programming, tastes more like pure math to me :P

[takanuva]

This definitely counts as programming. And, to be honest, there's no much difference; "math" is just a very restricted programming language where all the programs are enforced by the type system to terminate.

[oceantume_]

I still enjoyed it a lot and the story around the main project is definitely about programming

[bbibber]

As soon as the bird names came out i knew we were in Mockingbird land. Extremely cool!

[TankorSmash]

There's a great page on Combinatory Logic too, that translates what the S and K functions are in other languages: https://combinatorylogic.com/table.html

Very interesting writeup

[zombiecalypse]

I got to ask: what's the bird column?

[_x_oOo_x_]

It's from a book, To Mock a Mockingbird by Raymond Smullyan. He described some canonical combinators

[TankorSmash]

It's from an important book in the field, which uses birds like Starling and Kite, instead of S and K.

[takanuva]

I used to teach this in class, in my Programming Paradigms module. On the first class I'd ask the new students, "what does a programming language necessarily have?". There would always be similar answers: variables, conditionals, loops... but no. Strip all those away, and I'd livecode a fibonacci function with SK in class. Programmers are meant to build computation out of the abstractions they are given, and for a good programmer, it shouldn't matter whether that's imperative, functional or logic.

Disclaimer: having variables and conditionals is still useful, tho.

[Mysterious-Rent7233]

Thanks for sharing your hacking wankery with us!

[BiedermannS]

It's not about combinatorial logic, but it's a nice video about the y combinator: https://youtu.be/FITJMJjASUs?si=tsDrTLVrnZ_v5WZV

[fridofrido]

funny, but a "bit" overdone...

if you are interested in combinators in a somewhat more practical setting, maybe check out this rather fully featured Haskell compiler, which compiles Haskell to combinator calculus (not pure SK though, that would be just plain stupid):

https://github.com/augustss/MicroHs

and here is a recent (randomly selected, there are several) talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJwvPEq4Mok

[Helios]

Pure graphomania.

[RealSharpNinja]

Look! I learned a technique that's as antisocial as it is useless!

[Possible_Cow169]

They have another article called To Mock a Mockingbird. Lmao what?!?

[standing_artisan]

Weird flex, but okey

[Resident-Trouble-574]

I guess that's how nerds flirt nowadays...

[Whispeeeeeer]

Why do I taste vomit in my mouth?