Y Not – Adventures in Functional Programming (2012)

Jeff Casimir summed up the situation well:

>If you want to honor @jimweirich, treat everyone like they're your best friend, smart, and fascinating. That's how he lived.

https://twitter.com/j3/status/436514758833876992

I saw the version of this talk that he gave at Strange Loop in 2012 using Clojure instead of Ruby:

https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/y-not-adventures-in-func...

It was hands down the best talk at the conference that year. RIP.

Edit: 2013 => 2012

I was very curious to see a post on the Ynot project http://ynot.cs.harvard.edu/ on HN but this make more sense.

I thought I'd never understand the Y-Combinator and unbelievably after that talk I nearly kind of do. What a great speaker, you can see that the guy had such a warm heart and spirit. My sympathies go out to anyone who knew him personally.

I've taken to defining "@" as the Y combinator, so it looks kind of like a "goto" label for looping, e.g.:

  (@\fact\n \n==n <= n 0 1 (* n (fact (- n 1))))

(The \n==n forces an eager evaluation, to avoid building a tower of deferred operations with large n.)

The symbol "fact" is arbitrary, e.g. you could say this instead:

  (@\loop\n \n==n <= n 0 1 (* n (loop (- n 1))))

To define a name "fact" for that function, it's:

  \fact = (@\loop\n \n==n <= n 0 1 (* n (loop (- n 1))))

It's a shame about Jim. I never knew him but he did a lot for the community. RIP, he'll be missed.

This is hands down my favorite talk that Jim ever gave. A great example of live coding.

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):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs

I've just learned about the Y-Combinator in a lecture about functional programming a few weeks ago. Very excited for the Video as soon, as the website is up again.

Was introduced only recently to Jim Weirich. Fabulous computer engineer and talker. RIP.