
Ask HN: What is wrong with this approach? - martyalain
Hi,<p>In this last paper http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lambdaway.free.fr&#x2F;workshop&#x2F;?view=els_2018<p>1) Following a short introduction understandable by an average people, I show how three rules and a single predicate function working on simple words are sufficient to introduce the key concepts of a functional language, data structures and recursion. I am not aware of any presentation of recursion being more simple, relegating the Y-combinator to the rank of a fun exercise, and in any case secondary. A kind of lambda-calculus for dummies!<p>2) As a first application, I build the set of natural numbers defined as lists, replacing the rather old Church&#x27;s approach and leading to a simple and &quot;symetric&quot; definition of the standard operators [+,-,*,&#x2F;,%]. Just an exercice demonstrating what can be done with so little foundations.<p>3) Finally I show how to use the modern web browsers&#x27; powerful functionalities to build on this single and strong basis, &quot;on demand&quot; and online, more and more sophisticated libraries leading to a true programmable programming language.<p>Since a long time I try to share - for free - such an open source personal work with people around me, especially here in Hacker News. I thought it was the place to do that. But zero echo, nada, at least concerning the &quot;substance&quot;.<p>So my question is « What is wrong with this approach? »<p>Your opinion is welcome. 
Please, don&#x27;t be evil!
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martyalain
The workshop: [http://lambdaway.free.fr/](http://lambdaway.free.fr/)

The paper:
[http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=els_2018](http://lambdaway.free.fr/workshop/?view=els_2018)

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billconan
I didn’t read further than the abstract because I couldn’t tell why we need a
new language.

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martyalain
Maybe to understand the making of a language, it's the subject of this paper.

And « There are hundred of wiki engines and hundred of languages! Why yet
another wiki and another language nobody will ever want to use? »

Here some elements to begin an answer:

A wiki[1] is a web application which allows collaborative modification,
extension, or deletion of its content and structure. Following the first wiki
created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham hundred of wikis have moved us from simple
consumers to creators of shared informations. The best known of wikis is
Wikipedia, full of rich documented pages written by authors supposed to be
neither web designers nor coders. Wikis come generally with rather rudimentary
and heterogeneous syntaxes to enter, enrich and structure texts. At the lowest
level documents are created using HTML & CSS syntaxes. But writing HTML/CSS
code being rather complex and at least tiresome, intermediate syntaxes, for
instance Markdown syntax, have been created to make things a little bit
easier. Everything works well but the code quickly becomes rather obfuscated,
difficult to write, read, edit and maintain. In fact, the Markdown syntax is
not intended for writing rich documents.

Works have been done to build enhanced syntaxes, true languages, in order to
unify authoring, styling and coding, for instance CURL, LML, Scribble, SXML,
LAML, Pollen ... But these tools are definitively devoted to coders, not to
web designers and even less to authors, making difficult - if not impossible -
a true collaborative work. Hence the {lambda way} project!

More on that in [http://lambdaway.free.fr/](http://lambdaway.free.fr/)

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itamarst
Try asking on lobste.rs, more people there who like this sort of thing.

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martyalain
Thank you for the link. Signup is by invitation only to combat spam and
increase accountability. Could you invite me?

