thatmattbone.com

On Monday I was discussing the y combinator at Rossi’s.  The next morning I wrote an example in scheme to send to my friends, but they don’t speak scheme.  Sadly, this is tricky to write in python because of the lack of multi-line lambdas, but it’s damned easy in javascript:

(function(x, thunk) {
 if(x==0) {
   return 0;
 } else {
   return x + thunk(x-1, thunk);
 }
})(5, function(x, thunk) {
        if(x==0) {
          return 0;
        } else {
          return x + thunk(x-1, thunk);
        }
});

See, there’s something to love about every language. And the beauty of this example is that you can probably type it write into the javascript console of you browser. REPL included.