lambdaspeech :: ASK

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{center A question posted to [[Hacker News|https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19366809]]}

_h1 About the '{lambda way} project.

_p Dear hackers,

_p I spend lot of time analyzing numerous programming languages. Which are always amazing constructions built by clever people. They can be either lonely people somewhere in the countryside or more often doctors & engineers working in pretigious universities or/and big companies, creating huge eco-systems. It's difficult to fight against that. And why should we fight? A fight lost in advance, most of languages are freely available and find/demonstrate their incontestable utility in their own domains of application.

_p The only condition to fulfill is that, obviously, we must learn a lot to master them, learn specific syntaxes, memorize many keywords, many libraries, acquire new reflexes. It's not so easy and can lead to a confinment, if not a jail or a dead end, in case of a bad choice.

_p This is where the '{lambda way} project ([[http://lambdaway.free.fr/|http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/]]) seems worthy of interest, at least in the web environment. Using '{lambda talk} in the '{lambda tank} context is nothing but using this good old λ-calculus dressed in Lisp clothes and fed by the powerful functionalities (HTML, CSS, SVG, DOM, Javascript, ...) coming for free with modern web browsers.

_p This is what Ward Cunningham told me about this work (2014/04/29):
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« I am impressed with this work and understand its uniqueness better now. I have also rambled through other pages you have made, many as experiments I would guess, and have been summarized by you in this single work. Bravo. »
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_p And Simon Peyton Jones (2019/02/14):
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« I took a quick look. It looks cool -- I like the simple, minimal, but powerful approach. »
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_p And also Paul McJones (2019/02/16):
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« I have admired the power and elegance of the lambda calculus since I first learned of it around 1970. And I have admired the elegance of the Wiki idea since I first ran across Ward Cunningham’s Wiki some years back. You’ve combined these ideas in a very interesting way, and you figured out a way to harness the power of web technologies (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.) to implement them. »
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_p In fact '{lambda talk} is a dwarf on the shoulders of giants. Obviously you still  have to learn standard web technologies which are universal and well documented. But that can be done in a coherent and progressive way. Time invested learning '{lambda talk} is time spent to learn concepts from a reduced set of rules, without grey areas, any magic feature, any external dependancies. For instance anonymous functions, Y-combinator, closures or curry are no more UFOs coming from elsewhere, but are naturally introduced from simple rules. More to see in [[factory|?view=factory_201902_short]].

_p '{lambda talk} is everything but an esoteric new language out of the brain of an enlightened newcomer. It's not intended to be a jail. The main quality of the '{lambda way} project could be that, at any time, you are free to switch back to HTML, CSS, SVG, Javascript, ... which are its very foundations. The good teacher teaches how to do without him.

_p But, after so much times spent in total loneliness, without any feed back - except for the masters mentioned above - I have to admit that such an ultra simple approach is very, very difficult to understand. Sort of UFO!

_p My question is just: {b Why?}
_p Your opinion is welcome. {i Please, don't be evil.}

_p {i Alain Marty}

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