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Y Not? - Adventures in Functional Programming
Recorded at:

by Jim Weirich on Nov 01, 2012 |
46:08

Summary
Jim Weirich uses Y-Combinator as a tool to explain the nature of functional programming.

Bio

Jim Weirich has been developing now for over 25 years, working with everything from crunching rocket launch data on supercomputers to wiring up servos and LEDs on micro-controllers. Currently he loves working in Ruby and Rails as the Chief Scientist at EdgeCase, but you can also find him strumming on his ukulele as time permits.

Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that aims to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow's technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, mobile development, and the web. Strange Loop was created in 2009 by software developer Alex Miller and is now run by a team of St. Louis-based friends and developers under Strange Loop LLC, a for-profit but not particularly profitable venture.

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Community comments

Ah yes the dreaded Y-Combinator... by Faisal Waris

Made my head spin the first time I encountered it. However if you get this then the rest of FP is easy.

Note in ML style languages (including F#) the y-combinator is defined as:

let rec y f x = f (y f) x
let factorial = y (fun f -> function 0 -> 1 | n -> n * f(n - 1))

Also, ML/OCaml/F# are typed so cannot directly express y-combinator unless the 'rec' (means recursive) keyword is used.

Interestingly, "Y Combinator" (ycombinator.com) is the name of a venture capital firm (which was most likely founded by LISP maniacs)

Live coding video by Dave Kincaid

You guys should really spend some time figuring out how to do a better job of taking video of talks that use live coding and live demos. There has to be a better way than simply pointing the camera at the screen and hoping the lighting is good. In this case it isn't and you've lost most of the impact of this excellent talk.

Re: Live coding video by Kris K

I second that. Many of the videos on infoq have live coding sessions and it is hard to see the video if you are just pointing the camera at the screen.

Re: Live coding video by Andrey Paramonov

Agree. InfoQ ruined the most interesting part of this talk.

Re: Live coding video by Dave Kincaid

I won't be quite that hard on them. It is a difficult thing to do and I certainly don't know the solution to it. I think it would really make them stand out even more if they could solve this problem.

Re: Live coding video by Kjetil Valstadsve

There are specialized hardware solutions for this problem, which is basically recording the screen output of a computer:

www.crestron.com/resources/product_and_programm...

www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/h264prorecord...

You probably need hardware for this, because you can't trust screencast software to run reliably - in a live setting - on all the different laptops that go through a conference like this.

I've been pestering @strangeloop_stl on twitter about this a bit, and they seem amenable to a little pressure on this point :-)

Video download please by Olumide Olumide

How about making the video downloadable. I'd like to watch the talk while commuting. Plus, you could embed the video in one corner of the slides.

Re: Live coding video by Floyd Marinescu

Hi guys, we know that our videos suck for demo's, there are no easy solutions to this. Our video crew says that the hardware solutions are not reliable although this could certainly be tested.

Right now we publish an average of 13 conf presentations a week for free that we have filmed from over 35 conferences that we partnered with. Any tweaks to the model, increasing the size or bandwidth of the video window on the site, increasing the personnel at these events to manage screen capture devices or 2nd camera's, can increase costs so significantly that we would then have to film and publish less videos.

So as a result we've kept things simple, following the 80/20 rule so we can get more videos out and thus more value to the community.

We know demo's are a problem. However we are listening and this issue isn't being dismissed. It is something I hope we can solve next year.

Floyd
InfoQ Co-founder & CEO

Re: Live coding video by Dave Kincaid

Here is a great example of how this can be really well done. This is the same talk from a different conference recorded by a different group. (They also provide high quality downloadable files, hint, hint)

www.confreaks.com/videos/1287-rubyconf2012-y-no...

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