

Lisp as the Maxwell’s equations of software (2012) - YAYERKA
http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equations-of-software/

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cyrus_
I think if anything should be seen as analagous to Maxwell's equations, it
should be the lambda calculus. It is actually a piece of mathematics, rather
than the mess of compiler internals this article describes.

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tromp
Agreed. The Binary lambda calculus

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_lambda_calculus)

features this universal machine:

    
    
        (λ11)(λλλ1(λλλλ3(λ5(3(λ2(3(λλ3(λ123)))(4(λ4(λ31(21))))))
        (1(2(λ12))(λ4(λ4(λ2(14)))5))))(33)2)(λ1((λ11)(λ11)))
    

which parses a binary-encoded lambda term and evaluates its application to the
remaining input bits.

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vezzy-fnord
Previously on Hacker News:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830867](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830867)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9038505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9038505)

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sytelus
I like the article content but analogy is completely off putting. Maxwell's
Equations weren't exactly known for its compactness. When he published them,
they were huge in number and size. The major achievement of Maxwell's equation
was to calculate speed of light with previously known completely unrelated
constants. This opened up door that light was perhaps electromagnetic waves.
The code described in this article is cool for its compactness but otherwise
from computer science perspective its not breaking any new grounds.

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codemac
Neat seeing the python and the lisp implementation next to each other. It
reminds me of 'Make A Lisp'[0].

[0]: [https://github.com/kanaka/mal](https://github.com/kanaka/mal)

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pjmlp
Back when I was into Python (mid-2000), this reference was quite famous:

Python for Lisp Programmers - [http://norvig.com/python-
lisp.html](http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html)

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garycomtois
The tiddlylisp implementation is interesting. Seeing a Lisp compiler in my
usual language (Python) is helpful. If nothing else, I'm really glad I read
the article since I'm giving Lisp another try (via Land of Lisp,
[http://landoflisp.com/](http://landoflisp.com/)) after a 9 month hiatus.

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peter303
Technically these are Heavyside equations who was fond of Div and Curl. The
original 20 Maxwell equations are here:

www.zpenergy.com/downloads/Orig_maxwell_equations.pd

