Combinators: A Centennial View
arxiv.org
Combinators: A Centennial View
1–10 of 11 posts
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#2I find this painful to read. It's always about what Stephen Wolfram has done and how it is realised in Mathematica. If you are a true expert in a field you should have less trouble acknowledging other people's contributions. I missed, for example, the connection with Church numerals or the acknowledgement that substitution is not just defined in Mathematica.
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#3If you want to learn about combinators and have some great fun while doing it I just can't recommend enough of this book: "To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan. Don't sweat it, buy it, I haven't had so much fun in a long time.
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#4If you want to learn about combinators and have some great fun while doing it I just can't recommend enough of this book: "To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan. Don't sweat it, buy it, I haven't had so much fun in a long time.
Seconding this book. I jumped back to the beginning of his recreational logic books and have been reading through them this year. Lots of fun, and as a programmer there’s an extra (self-induced) challenge to explore programs that can generate, solve, or interpret the systems and problems he sets up.
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#5If you want to learn about combinators and have some great fun while doing it I just can't recommend enough of this book: "To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan. Don't sweat it, buy it, I haven't had so much fun in a long time.
Seconding this book. I jumped back to the beginning of his recreational logic books and have been reading through them this year. Lots of fun, and as a programmer there’s an extra (self-induced) challenge to explore programs that can generate, solve, or interpret the systems and problems he sets up.
Thirding.
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconding this book. I jumped back to the beginning of his recreational logic books and have been reading through them this year. Lots of fun, and as a programmer there’s an extra (self-induced) challenge to explore programs that can generate, solve, or interpret the systems and problems he sets up.
Thirding.
Fourthing.
And also his Godelian Puzzle Book, much fun!
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#7I find this painful to read. It's always about what Stephen Wolfram has done and how it is realised in Mathematica. If you are a true expert in a field you should have less trouble acknowledging other people's contributions. I missed, for example, the connection with Church numerals or the acknowledgement that substitution is not just defined in Mathematica.
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#8I find this painful to read. It's always about what Stephen Wolfram has done and how it is realised in Mathematica. If you are a true expert in a field you should have less trouble acknowledging other people's contributions. I missed, for example, the connection with Church numerals or the acknowledgement that substitution is not just defined in Mathematica.
LOL, Almost every thread I read related to Stephen Wolfram, there are always people who complain about his ego.
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#9I find this painful to read. It's always about what Stephen Wolfram has done and how it is realised in Mathematica. If you are a true expert in a field you should have less trouble acknowledging other people's contributions. I missed, for example, the connection with Church numerals or the acknowledgement that substitution is not just defined in Mathematica.
Yeah, I find it circuitously poses similar questions over and over, with vague allegories towards hypothetical application, and provides no real conclusions. For example in the part about evaluation order, a long walk through all the different observations, and some small ideas of what "mathematica does", and as I read hoping for a final conclusion on the section, a redirect to a new subject. Feels like I was listening to a joke with no punchline, on the edge of the seat over and over again. In the end I don't know what I was hoping for, but I feel the key works in the field of Algorithmic Information Theory, expresses all of these ideas more succinctly, the irony of which is not lost on me. Wolfram is a physicist who wants to be a computer scientist? A computer scientist who wants to be a mathematician? None of the above in the pursuit of all of the above? I always walk away from his ramblings feeling the same way. I did find he had some great occasionally insightful observation, but to what effect? I'd like to see what happens when he takes an approach like this to a more applied problem, rather than this endless open-ended "future of
..." (Physics, computing, etc)
Re: Combinators: A Centennial View
#10I find this painful to read. It's always about what Stephen Wolfram has done and how it is realised in Mathematica. If you are a true expert in a field you should have less trouble acknowledging other people's contributions. I missed, for example, the connection with Church numerals or the acknowledgement that substitution is not just defined in Mathematica.
LOL, Almost every thread I read related to Stephen Wolfram, there are always people who complain about his ego.
And rightfully so.