Deriving the Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

Deriving the Y Combinator

catonmat.net

19 pointsgnosis10 comments

This explanation looks like it was lifted with little modification from The Little Schemer - a book that cannot be recommended enough.

I agree. It's the best book ever. Also see The Seasoned Schemer and The Reasoned Schemer.

Similarly there is "A Little Java, A Few Patterns", that one teaches Java, and is written by the same authors.

I was so excited about these books that I started writing "The Little C", it's gonna teach C the same way schemer books teach lisp!

PS. I always give proper attribution. You missed "My derivation is based on the one in "The Little Schemer" book."

PPS. The Little Schemer explains very little about what's going on. I explain all the steps in details.

PPPS. Books are meant to be quoted, re-interpreted, and re-stated.

All valid points, though I disagree with PPS :) Learning that sticks comes from filling in the little blanks yourself. I think Friedman is a master of giving tasty little clues while still leaving plenty for the reader to solve by themselves.

i stopped reading it after 4 or 5 steps, it was a nightmare trying to understand that in the Little Schemer.

The Little Schemer has got to be one of the most annoying books ever written. The tone makes it sound like they're talking to a 5-year old, and the repetition and glacially slow pace makes for incredibly boring and frustrating reading.

It took about 3 or 4 readings for me. That's the fun part IMO.

The Y-combinator allows an anonymous function to call itself, that is, it allows anonymous function recursion.

I have just started out in my coding journey so I can appreciate but not fully understand what that means. With enough work, I hope that changes.

The quickest way to get from point A to point B, in this case, is the SICP video lectures: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussma...

If you can spare two hours a day for two weeks (or the equivalent) you're golden.

I am heading off to Cape Town in the new year for 3 months with two objectives:

  Improve my coding
  Improve my kiting

I will definitely go through those and let you know how it goes. Thank you!

Maybe I didn't find the best conversions, but the only ones I found with decent image quality were the MPEG1's from archive.org . Note also that in VLC I found I had to force-set the proper aspect ratio when viewing them.

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