

How I finally understood the Y Combinator - dragonquest
http://noeit.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/how-i-finally-understood-the-y-combinator-and-blew-my-damn-mind/

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burke
This is what made it click for me: <http://nex-3.com/posts/43-fun-with-the-y-
combinator-in-ruby>

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alex_c
The computer science part of my brain says "hmm, that's neat" (admittedly,
it's likely that it's not fully clicking for me yet).

The engineering part of my brain says "OK, so what does that let me build that
is much harder without it?"

~~~
danbmil99
I'm with you so far. As an (originally) low-level programmer, I learned to
deal first with state machines and performance, so functional programming
looks sort of ivory tower and meaningless.

However, trying to get things to work efficiently in parallel on clusters of
multicore machines, working mostly in Python, the issues I _think_ FP tries to
address are starting to come into focus.

I once sat through a 2 hour seminar just to hear Guido Van Rossum talk about
parallelization in Python. When it came time for him to speak, he said
something like "I don't know why I was invited -- I neither care nor think
very much about parallelism". This was sort of amusing. Note his comments on
tail recursion elsehwere on YC.

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eru
I come from the opposite end of the spectrum. Only recently have I begone to
worry about implementation in the real world.

Have you had a look at <http://users.bigpond.net.au/d.keenan/Lambda/index.htm>
? It give an introduction into the more general theory of combinatorial logic
instead of just focusing on the y-combinator.

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visitor4rmindia
This 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>

