Top all-time · #2193
Mike Vanier
Personal blog · mvanier.livejournal.comprogramming
Mike Vanier's personal blog at mvanier.livejournal.com covers programming. Since 2008, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “The Y Combinator (2008)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Mike Vanier's posts explaining monads and the Y combinator, plus advice to learn several programming paradigms. Commenters recommend them for building intuition about these topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Y Combinator (2008)17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2008-08-14
- The Y Combinator6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-08-22
- Yet Another Monad Tutorial3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-08-26
- “Foundational” programming languages (2009)2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-08-22
- The Y Combinator2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-07-21
What Hacker News says?
In Haskell and PureScript, Monad is a typeclass just like any other. They are an abstraction, effectful computation is not inherent to them, they represent computational contexts, e.g. the list monad is used to model non-determinism, the maybe monad represents computations that can fail, both of these are pure. This is an excellent set of posts for building an intuition about monads: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/3…
Comment linking /3917.html
on “Regex that only matches itself”Submitted The Y Combinator (2008) as a story · 98 points
HN discussionafaik it's pretty academic. The only practical application is to allow recursion in languages that don't do recursion which is pretty much none. This is a good description if you're into that sort of thing: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html The meat of it is that you can 'do' recursion by building up functions that call other functions :/ meh
Comment linking /2897.html
on “PG on the cover of Forbes ”Submitted The Y Combinator as a story · 86 points
HN discussionsimilar blogposts/SO http://dave.fayr.am/posts/2011-08-19-lets-go-shopping.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3958630/what-are-importan... http://mvanier.livejournal.com/998.html http://langref.org/ http://www.kimchy.org/coders-recession-guide/ http://matt.might.net/articles/best-programming-languages/ http://www.hackernewsers.com/skills/index.html (scroll wayyy down to "Programming"
Comment linking /998.html
on “Programming languages worth checking out”Submitted The Y Combinator as a story · 69 points
HN discussionYes there are. What made monads eventually "click" for me was the incredibly detailed, eight-part Mike Vanier's tutorial on monads in general and in Haskell in particular. First part: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/3917.html
Comment linking /3917.html
on “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)”Submitted The Y Combinator as a story · 29 points
HN discussionFun to try with code (mildly). Here's the geekiest I could do that's worth sharing :-) http://i.imgur.com/IBaLCn4.png - based on the first stanza from the following: Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Lisper got to sit and wonder, (Y (Y Y))? Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Lisper got to tell himself he understand. — Kurt Vonnegut, modified by Darius Bacon, (as quoted on this blog entry http://mvanier.livejour…
Comment linking /2897.html
on “Show HN: TypeSlab – simple, shareable typographic posters”Submitted The Y Combinator, or How to Succeed at Recursion Without Really Recursing as a story · 27 points
HN discussionIf it helps, I'm rather fond of this explanation: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html Especially this part, from toward the beginning: > Before I get into the details of what Y actually is, I'd like to address the question of why you, as a programmer, should bother to learn about it. To be honest, there aren't a lot of good nuts-and-bolts practical reasons for learning about Y. Even though it does have a few p…
Comment linking /2897.html
on “Common Lisp Books”Submitted What is a Y Combinator? as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThe advice to learn a variety of programming paradigms is sound: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/998.html http://matt.might.net/articles/best-programming-languages/ -------------- I haven't read pyHardWay, but I think it's vaguely in the lineaage of why's: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/188-agile/ruby/whys... and for FP: http://learnyouahaskell.com/ http://learnyousomeerlang.com/content http://www.lisperati…
Comment linking /998.html
on “Ask HN: How to step up my coding skills?”Submitted New programming blog from Mike Vanier (of LFM/LFSP fame) as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI really liked this article: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html I have been working through SICP and I ended up taking a weekend break from it to really understand everything in the article.
Comment linking /2897.html
on “Y combinator in Scheme”Submitted Why Scala Is Interesting as a story · 13 points
HN discussionWell, they're both foundational languages, pretty much, not in the sense of this blog, i.e. most instructional language http://mvanier.livejournal.com/998.html but in the sense of can you put up a significant web app in 2 or 3 days, do lots of companies use it (along with C, java, C#, javascript). r vs. p can't be reduced to 15 bullet points, but one of the best things i remember is Alex Martelli in 2003, so he was…
Comment linking /998.html
on “Ask HN: What does Ruby have that Python doesn't?”Submitted The Y Combinator (2008) as a story · 6 points
HN discussion+1 learn different paradigms. Besides reading language tutorials, read some PLT (prog lang theory on Lambda the ultimate, and these survey type things. (And you'l frequently see ruby, python, erlang folks say "We have to drop down in C to get plausible performance" or "this algo was already thoroughly tested in C or java". You kinda have to know C and java to get s##t done. http://mvanier.livejournal.com/998.html ht…
Comment linking /998.html
on “Ask HN: Should I learn C?”Submitted The Y Combinator (Slight Return) (2008) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis link (from the comments on the OP) is actually a very interesting yet simple explaination of the Y-Combinator. http://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html
Comment linking /2897.html
on “How I finally understood the Y Combinator”Submitted Great Explanation of the Y Combinator as a story · 3 points
HN discussionTXR Lisp: (defun y (f) [(op @1 @1) (op f (op [@@1 @@1]))]) It looks like the Haskell one is calling itself by name: (y f) appears in the right hand side. That's against the spirit of the exercise. The Y combinator is a way of boostrapping the ability to have functions be able to call themselves in a language which doesn't have named functions as a primitive. See here: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html starti…
Comment linking /2897.html
on “Was Y Combinator worth it?”Submitted The Y Combinator (an explanation) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMike's not a Ruby fan. Short version: he once told me that "The best thing I can say about Ruby is that there's a wonderful smaller language inside it struggling to get out." Long version: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/1351.html
Comment linking /1351.html
on “Scalable computer programming languages”Submitted The Y Combinator (Slight Return) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBeautiful! If it’s not clear this is the original meaning of Y combinator in computer science. Here is a link I found about it: https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html
Comment linking /2897.html
on “Show HN: The Y Combinator Codex”Submitted The Y Combinator (Slight Return) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA well-typed program is isomorphic to a proof -- google "propositions as types". This is not the same as saying your program is correct. For your specific question, google "dependent types", which are types that depend on a value. In your case, Haskell can type check positive integers: http://mvanier.livejournal.com/3820.html
Comment linking /3820.html
on “Ask HN: A well-typed program won't go wrong?”Submitted The Y Combinator (Slight Return) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
