You Can Explain Functional Programming Using Emojis

ycombinator.chibicode.com

4 points·chibicode··3 comments

I’m the author of this article—ask me any questions! :)

This is very interesting.

I wonder though whether it's true that this is how you can teach non-programmers functional programming because the way the emoji puzzles are evaluated is an algorithm expressed in English, but not a very simple one with all the "labels" and "numbers" etc.

I would think this more how you can teach programmers lambda-calculus.

But this is excellent. I wonder if this visual presentation of lambda calculus is your invention or is there some material that predates this?

Thanks for the comment!

> not a very simple one with all the "labels" and "numbers" etc.

I understand this concern. I did have quite a large number of non-technical people do the Japanese version of this course (I have a big following in Japan), and they seemed to actually understand it based on the feedback I got.

The course itself doesn't use any code and is not very fast-paced compared to this article: it spreads out the material covered in this article in 17 pages and takes about 2-3 hours to read.

> I wonder if this visual presentation of lambda calculus is your invention

It's my invention (spent a year tweaking the details) but was inspired by things like Scratch. https://scratch.mit.edu/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com