Alligator Eggs and Lambda Calculus (2007)

(worrydream.com)

29 points by veqq 18 January 2025 | 8 comments

Comments

bitwize 20 January 2025
I always thought this was up there with "monads are like burritos" in terms of how it makes things more complicated instead of simplifying them. Maybe that's just my old ass, and kids would appreciate it more. When I was a kid one of my teachers referred to the > and < symbols as "alligator mouths" and said "Just remember the alligator mouth eats the bigger number." Helped me keep those symbols straight for years.
Jtsummers 20 January 2025
Some past discussions. I thought it had been discussed more but maybe it turned up in other discussions rather than as a submission of its own.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906167 - Jan 18, 2015 (24 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4586692 - Sept 28, 2012 (24 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600736 - May 9, 2009 (9 comments)

scotty79 21 January 2025
This post many years ago made me realize that there's nothing uniquely interesting about lambda calculus. That it's just weird, convoluted virtual machine that can be (barely) used for programming.