Composition Intuition by Conor Hoekstra | Lambda Days 2023

✨This talk was recorded at Lambda Days 2023. If you're curious about our upcoming event, check lambdadays.org ✨
Conor Hoekstra, Research Scientist, NVIDIA:
Most people think of function composition as composing two unary functions together (the B combinator). However, this is only the tip of the proverbial "function composition" iceberg. This talk will be both an introduction and an overview of the world of combinatory logic and combinators. If you have ever wondered what the S, Phi, Psi, or B1 combinators are and why they are so useful, this is the talk for you. And even if you have never wondered that - I promise this talk will be worth your time. It will expand the limits of what you thought was possible with programming languages and give you the tools and knowledge to use combinators in your choice of programming language.
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[@BenjaminScherrey]

Great intro talk to get people curious as to how these things can be practical.

[@user-tx4wj7qk4t]

The real practicality is basically going and learning the combinators off uiua's website and then using them in your haskell code which will likely lead to mostly tacit code. The problem is the standard library sucks for it so you'll probably have to make your own or use the aviary library

[@c4tubo]

Nothing will help folks grok the value of combinators and tacit if not the slide at 39:18

[@user-tx4wj7qk4t]

Rank polymorphism is why apl looks like that. But ya the countElem solution is very elegant and how most people should be writing code