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Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming
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Summarized using AI

Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming

Jim Weirich • November 01, 2012 • Denver, Colorado • Talk

In this talk titled "Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming" presented at RubyConf 2012, Jim Weirich explores the Y-combinator, a critical concept in functional programming that helps in understanding recursion and anonymous functions. The Y-combinator, while theoretically interesting, is not often used in practical real-world programming but offers deep insights into functional programming paradigms. The session emphasizes the importance of grasping such concepts to enhance one’s programming skills, particularly in functional programming.

Key Points Covered:
- Introduction to Recursive Computation: Weirich begins by introducing the concept of recursively defined functions, citing Turing machines and Lambda calculus as foundational tools for computation.
- Lambda Calculus: He elaborates on Lambda calculus, describing how it represents functions solely through the use of Lambda expressions. This emphasizes that functions are first-class citizens in this paradigm, and all operations are achieved through function application.
- Beta Reduction: The process of beta reduction in Lambda calculus is explained, highlighting how functions manipulate arguments through substitution, which serves as the core of computation in this structure.
- Fix Points: A detailed explanation of fix points follows, detailing how certain functions stabilize on particular values, illustrated with the cosine function which converges to a specific value when iteratively applied.
- Higher Order Functions: Weirich illustrates how higher order functions, which can accept other functions as arguments or return them, are pivotal in creating flexible and powerful programming constructs.
- Practical Recursion with Y-Combinator: The session culminates in the implementation of the Y-combinator in Ruby, demonstrating how to achieve recursion without explicitly naming functions. This involves clever use of Lambda expressions to allow functions to reference themselves indirectly.

Illustrations and Demonstrations:
- Weirich conducts a live demonstration with Ruby code, showing both correct implementations and showcasing some humorous examples of ‘bad’ Ruby code in context of functional programming practices.
- He discusses and applies concepts like function composition and the tenant correspondence principle to modify and refactor functions while maintaining functional purity.

Conclusion:
- The talk emphasizes that understanding the Y-combinator and its implications on recursion and functional programming greatly enriches a programmer's capabilities. Despite its limited use in practical applications, mastery of such theoretical constructs is seen as beneficial for deepening one’s understanding of programming logic. Weirich concludes by recommending further exploration of functional programming through other illustrative talks, particularly Tom Stuart's "Programming with Nothing."

Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming
Jim Weirich • Denver, Colorado • Talk

Date: November 01, 2012
Published: March 19, 2013
Announced: unknown

One of the deepest mysteries in the functional programming world is the Y-Combinator. Many have heard of it, but few have mastered its mysteries. Although fairly useless in real world software, understanding how the Y-Combinator works and why it is important gives the student an important insight into the nature of functional programming.

Join with us on this journey of understanding. Be prepared to curry your functions and bind your lambdas as we delve into the whys and wherefores of this paragon of functional programming. Although you will probably never have a need for the combinator, the effort put forth to understand it will improve your functional programming chops. This talk is not for the faint of heart, but the successful student will be richly rewarded.

Also, you will understand why "Y-Combinator" is the perfect name for Paul Graham's start-up funding company.

At the end of his talk Jim references Tom Stuart's talk "Programming with Nothing" which can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhlNx_-wYk

RubyConf 2012

00:00:22.800 be here too um we are going to be talking about the why combinator this morning how many people here are very
00:00:29.400 familiar with with the Y combinator just a just a very few people
00:00:34.520 very good that means I can say anything I want to about it I've got extensive speaking
00:00:42.320 experience and I've learned a couple rules as particularly about keynote talks I mean Keynotes are just a little
00:00:48.920 bit different than your regular everyday session for one thing Keynotes tend to
00:00:54.719 be a little less technical you want to inspire the folks that that are
00:01:00.199 attending you want to motivate them so you tend to stay away from the highly technical talks I am glad to say this
00:01:12.759 really technical then maybe you should at least make what you're talking about relevant to the daytoday life of of the
00:01:21.280 programmers there so they can take home something that they can use in their you know in in their work you you know use
00:01:27.759 it tomorrow I am glad to say that this talk is extremely pointless and
00:01:33.119 there's there's very little in this that you can take home and
00:01:38.399 use well if you're not going to be relevant and you're uh going to be
00:01:45.680 highly technical then at least if you're doing code examples make it examples of good code good coding practices so
00:01:52.840 you're instilling those good practices in the people so that when they get home at least they've got something out of
00:01:58.479 that I am also happy to say this will be the worst Ruby code you've probably ever
00:02:04.880 seen so what are the redeeming factors of this talk well all I can say it's going to be a little bit of
00:02:14.480 fun the first thing I need to do is I'm going to need a little bit of audience participation so I need someone who has
00:02:22.760 a calculator that can calculate the cosine of an angle in radians do I have
00:02:28.400 any people who might have a calculator to do that anybody any volunteers
00:02:35.080 here oh oh way in the back there okay yes yes okay you got a calculator in there
00:02:41.599 go ahead and pull it
00:02:47.159 out oh good he's he's coming up here excellent
00:02:54.920 excellent okay all right I want you to type in the number zero yep make sure sure you are in radians mode for cosine
00:03:03.480 okay and then hit the cosine button yep okay you got an answer I do okay hit the
00:03:09.280 cosine button again okay hit it
00:03:14.319 again hit it again keep doing that till I get back to
00:03:22.440 you okay the topic of my talk is called effectively computable that's what we're
00:03:27.959 going to be talking about and this was a topic that was explored by a fellow named Alan touring you may have heard of
00:03:35.159 touring he invented something called a touring machine now touring machine is a simple machine that has an infinite tape
00:03:42.760 with cells on it those cells you can write characters in that into those cells and uh you can then read back the
00:03:49.920 cell you can erase the cell and write a new character into it and you can move the tape one position at a time and all
00:03:55.599 those functions are controlled by a very very very simple-minded program that sits and can say if the current cell is
00:04:02.959 a one then then shift left and go to this you know so very very simpleminded programming in fact here is an here is a
00:04:11.120 animation of a touring machine I so want one of these
00:04:21.639 devices so if you're watching if you're watching here there is a camera here
00:04:27.000 with a light and you can see it's reading these characters right right there it's reading the one it's reading
00:04:32.160 that one there's an eraser head over here that he can erase that one and then
00:04:38.000 write a zero in place of it this is a counter he initialized he initialized it with the number
00:04:43.320 11 and he's uh now we're up to
00:04:49.400 12 now we're up to 13 and it's a very simple program that
00:04:56.120 just reads the character under the camera and decides to whether change it to a one or zero and carries the one
00:05:02.160 over and it's doing binary counting so we are up to what that's looks like 14 now now we're up to
00:05:17.160 15 now we're carrying the one all the way up erases the
00:05:24.639 one and now it's running real time it was actually running in fast speed before this is real time now sees a zero
00:05:30.840 reads a zero all reads the one erases it writes in the zero it's going to
00:05:37.680 carry the one so it reads over until it finds a blank space and then it carries the one over into the blank space and
00:05:44.319 the program's done that is a touring
00:05:51.240 machine can somebody build me one of those that's awesome Turing said that anything that
00:05:58.840 is effectively computable can be computed by this really dirt simple
00:06:04.560 machine this touring machine and and what do you meant by anything that can be computed he he's generally generally
00:06:10.120 talking about mathematical functions or or logic problems or things like that anything that you can write an algorithm
00:06:15.440 to do you can write that algorithm in a touring machine and have your touring machine calculated out that's kind of
00:06:22.599 mind-boggling and I look at the date of on this this is in the 1936 1937 time
00:06:28.080 frame the very first programmable computer was probably invented in Germany in around 1936 so he's doing all
00:06:35.680 this research in his head on paper uh there's no computers that he's using to
00:06:41.400 do any of this search this stuff with at all so this is actually pre computer
00:06:46.440 work that's being done around the same time frame there's this fellow named Alonso
00:06:53.319 church and church designed something called Lambda calculus you might have heard of that Lambda calculus is a way
00:07:00.840 of calculating things it consists of the Lambda character here which introduces a
00:07:06.360 function the after the Lambda character will become a variable name here X after
00:07:12.120 the x is a DOT that separates the variable name from the body of the function and in this case the body of
00:07:17.639 the function is another X so this is in essence the identity function you pass this function in any value and it would
00:07:24.199 return that very same value so this is a very very very simple function in Lambda
00:07:29.280 C calculus this is all there is to Lambda
00:07:35.520 calculus so there are no strings there are no integers there are no floating
00:07:41.479 Point numbers in Lambda calculus there are only functions and the calling of
00:07:46.639 those functions so how do we represent interesting things in it well here's one particular scheme you might use to
00:07:52.800 represent some numbers let's look at the number one over there and you see it's a Lambda function that takes an argument F
00:07:59.199 and it returns a Lambda function that takes an argument X in essence you can think of this kind of in my mind I kind
00:08:05.960 of grouped this together as a single function taking two arguments and it takes the function f
00:08:12.360 and applies it it calls it on given the uh the value X so it calls the function
00:08:17.400 f uh passing in an x one time and that represents the number one the number two
00:08:23.879 is represented by a two argument function that takes a takes a function f and a value X and it calls the function
00:08:30.000 f twice on the function f so that represents a two zero calls the function
00:08:36.279 f0o times on the value and this is how we represent number we can represent any
00:08:41.560 number you want to just by applying the function f multiple times to that value
00:08:47.880 and this is this is called a church numeral this is how you represent numbers in Lambda calculus how might you
00:08:53.880 represent true and false at the bottom of the screen you can see true is a function of two variables and true
00:09:00.680 Returns the first variable false is also a function of two variables it Returns the second argument to that so true is
00:09:08.480 kind of like an if then else that Returns the then part and the false is an if then else that Returns the false
00:09:13.839 part so that's how you represent true and false in Lambda calculus so keys to Lambda calculus are
00:09:21.240 that functions are the only data type no integers no strings no floating point no arrays nothing else but functions Lambda
00:09:29.480 binding is the only way you can associate a value with a variable name
00:09:35.760 and you do Lambda binding by calling the function on a value and that will bind the value to the variable in the the
00:09:43.160 argument in the function and then you expand the body of the function using that substitution and all calculation in
00:09:49.440 Lambda calculus happens by a process called beta reduction there's also
00:09:54.680 another process called Alpha reduction but that's not the important one is the beta reduction
00:10:00.160 let's give you an example of beta reduction here we have the Lambda calculus representations of true uh and
00:10:08.240 it's being called on the number one and then the result of that is being passed in the number zero and we're passing in
00:10:14.440 the the Lambda calculus versions so to do a beta reduction you take the function in question you identify the
00:10:21.240 variable X and you expand the the body of the function out and then you replace
00:10:27.120 anywhere in the body where there is an X a variable you replace that with the argument so the argument one gets
00:10:33.200 substituted in for the X and this is the final result of that beta expansion let's do the one more beta expansion
00:10:39.839 expanding the result of this with the argument zero so we identify the the argument of the function is
00:10:46.360 y uh we expand the body of the function out and we brought it down below that's the red circle there and then we
00:10:53.600 substitute in zero for the value y in the body and happens to be no value y in
00:10:59.480 the body so we're done that's it so if you pass true a one and a zero it's
00:11:04.639 going to return a one that makes sense true is a function that Returns the first
00:11:10.839 argument so that's beta reduction in Lambda calculus and you can see that Lambda calculus is nothing more than
00:11:17.800 macro expansion it's merely text substitution that you take the arguments
00:11:23.399 and you substitute them in and expand them out this is really really simple macro expansion here
00:11:30.000 Church said anything that can be effectively computable can be computed via Lambda calculus and I hope you're
00:11:37.040 kind of scratching your head here because I just said ma Lambda calculus is nothing more than just simple macro
00:11:42.720 expansion but Church actually made his Theses he beat Turing to the punch he said this in uh around
00:11:49.279 1933 uh 1935 he wrote a couple papers on this topic so he beat Turing by a couple
00:11:54.880 years in fact when turing's paper came out and Turing said a turing machine can calculate anything that's effectively
00:12:01.360 computable there was a long debate in the mathematical circles whether the two sets of things that were effectively
00:12:07.600 computable were actually the same thing or not and generally today we agree that
00:12:12.639 Lambda calculus and touring machines and then there was a third thing called General recursion that uh was also done
00:12:19.000 all of those things are touring complete in other words they can all calculate everything that can be calculated can be
00:12:25.720 calculated in any of those three systems Lambda calculus General recursion or
00:12:31.560 uring machines now we see the influences of Lambda calculus today if you look at our
00:12:37.720 language lisp has lambdas all over it closure has an FN Anonymous function
00:12:42.880 that is essentially a Lambda in Ruby we like lambas so much we have several ways of doing
00:12:49.920 them coffee script has a very concise way of representing lambdas and
00:12:55.399 JavaScript itself has uh lambdas as well Anonymous functions are nothing more
00:13:01.639 than lambdas or closures if you went to Pat's talk yesterday on block you learned what a closure was and this is
00:13:07.480 all these things are our our closures or lambdas Okay so let's uh let's put that
00:13:13.839 aside and remember that even though it seems hard for us to believe Lambda calculus is touring complete and there's
00:13:20.959 a problem with that that we'll get to in a little bit but first I want to return to the topic where's where's my where's
00:13:26.320 my volunteer back here oh okay what number did you get after pressing cosine
00:13:31.639 many many times
00:13:37.880 07398 very good now why do you thank you thank you very much I really appreciate
00:13:48.959 that turns out if you take the cosine of zero that's a one if you take the cosine of one that is about 054 blah blah blah
00:13:56.839 and if you keep doing that over and over and over again again and if you do that about 89 or 90 times kind of depends on
00:14:04.360 how precise your floating Point math is you'll start zeroing in on a number that
00:14:10.000 is 73 9851 blah blah blah blah uh this is a
00:14:15.680 fix point of cosine that means if I give that seven or that 73 number to the
00:14:21.399 cosine function in radians it will return that exact same number and we have converged on this so a fix point is
00:14:29.800 nothing more than a value you give to a function and that that function Returns the same value then that is a fixed
00:14:36.000 Point turns out lots of functions have fixed points um okay here's the formal
00:14:41.199 definition of fixed point so you can see it give X to a function it returns x x will be a fixed point of that
00:14:48.000 function um for cosine cosine is a fun fix point because you get to zero in on
00:14:53.440 it just by hitting that cosine button a lot but other functions have actually much simpler fixed points for example
00:14:59.279 sign has a fixed point of zero cosine of 0 is zero so uh very simple a square
00:15:05.320 root turns out it has two fix points square root of 0 is zero and the square root of one is one so both zero and one
00:15:12.519 will be fixed points of the function square root uh if you had an identity function any value you gave to an
00:15:19.000 identity function would be a fix point for the identity function so there's an infinite number of fixed points for that
00:15:24.759 function and there's certainly some functions that have no fixed points at all
00:15:30.959 okay so keep the idea of a fix point in your head we're going to return to that and um we're going to switch now to the
00:15:38.800 live coding part of the demonstration okay very good um I'm
00:15:45.680 going to um you guys are familiar with the stabby procs in Ruby 1 n right and
00:15:52.800 you call them by saying dot parenthesis that's at least one way to call them I'm going to put this into my codebase right
00:15:59.160 here so I can just type in something and the last thing in this list of Expressions when I evaluate the buffer
00:16:04.399 we'll just return um the the last thing in that in that expression right there so that's just going to go going to be a
00:16:10.360 convenient way for me to evaluate a buffer and print things out so let's
00:16:15.519 talk about the problem with Lambda calculus and I'm going to demonstrate it by writing a factorial
00:16:22.360 function and we'll use the stabby proc notation so factorial is a function of
00:16:27.680 one argument if that argument is zero then the answer uh the result of factorial on zero should be one if it's
00:16:35.440 not zero the result of factorial should be n * the factorial of n minus one and
00:16:42.160 I can prove that works by calling factorial on five and we know the factorial of five is 120 very good and indeed that's what
00:16:51.199 we get all right but in Lambda calculus I'm not really allowed to assign things
00:16:57.839 like this I have to create a Lambda expression and then call it directly so I'm going to try to call my factorial
00:17:04.520 problem like this and it says oh I don't have a method called fact
00:17:12.079 defined anywhere and that's because I'm using fact in the definition of the function I'm defining
00:17:20.039 well in Lambda calculus all functions are Anonymous so how in the world can I
00:17:25.600 define that factorial without referring to itself and that's that's a problem so
00:17:31.280 how can Lambda calculus possibly be touring complete I'm going to leave that
00:17:37.280 comment up there and just think about that for a while and there's about four
00:17:42.679 topics three or four topics I want to cover first before we go back and solve this problem the first thing we've
00:17:49.120 already talked about the first thing is fix points so you guys know what a fix point is it's a value who given to a
00:17:55.799 function the function returns that same value again the next next thing I want to do is talk about higher order
00:18:05.080 functions now how how many people here are familiar with higher order functions yeah I suspect most of us are the rest
00:18:11.840 of us who are not probably use them all the time and don't really realize that in Ruby um each you know in its own
00:18:18.000 sense is a higher order function what a let's talk about regular functions first I'm going to write a function called add
00:18:23.799 one that takes a number and adds one to it and I can demonstrate that add one works by giving a 10 and I should get an
00:18:30.960 11 out of that so add one is a very simple
00:18:36.080 function um let's do another simple function just for demo purposes it's going to be multiply by three we'll take
00:18:42.320 n and multiply it by three and we'll multiply by three uh the result of
00:18:48.080 adding one to 10 and we should get 33 out of that so add one and mole three
00:18:53.320 are both basic simple functions they take a value they return a value let's write a higher order fun function
00:19:01.640 now
00:19:08.000 oops make Adder is a function that takes an argument X and what it's going to
00:19:14.360 return is another function that takes an argument n that adds X and N
00:19:23.600 together so make Adder is a function that creates a new function given the X
00:19:29.880 it will take that X and create a new function that will add X to anything that you give to the new X so I could
00:19:35.960 actually have Rewritten add one like this make
00:19:41.200 Adder one and that's a decent definition of
00:19:46.600 add one and we can evaluate our buffer and see we get the 33 back so add one obviously must be working so make Adder
00:19:54.760 is a higher order function it's higher order because it's return value is a function itself that's all it means to
00:20:01.120 be a higher order function it returns functional values uh here's another higher order function we'll call it
00:20:08.400 compose compose takes functions as arguments uh two functions in this case
00:20:14.000 f and g it's also going to return a function it's going to compose F on top
00:20:21.120 of the of G called on n and return a a new function that calls
00:20:27.360 f and g on top of each other we can now create a function called mole 3 add1
00:20:32.400 that is the composition of mole 3 and add
00:20:37.720 one then we can use that newly composed method right here and we see we get the
00:20:43.679 same answer 33 back compose is a higher order function it's higher order for two
00:20:49.799 reasons it returns a function but it also takes functions as arguments and that's enough to make it a higher order
00:20:55.240 function as well we are going to use higher order functions a lot in the rest
00:21:01.720 of this demo so if you've never seen them before just get comfortable with the fact that functions are values and
00:21:07.520 we can manipulate them just like we can manipulate strings and integers and whatnot all right higher order
00:21:14.159 functions next topic will be uh
00:21:19.279 functional
00:21:26.200 refactorings and just like in the object-oriented World there are refactorings that we can do like extract
00:21:33.559 method or collapse hierarchy there are there are a number of refactorings that you can do in the functional world that
00:21:40.400 as well and they are purely functional in flavor the first one I want to talk about is the tenant correspondence
00:21:48.159 principle spondence
00:21:53.880 principle okay tenant says if I have a expression X and I surrounded by a
00:21:59.679 Lambda and then immediately call that Lambda I get X back it essentially has
00:22:05.559 no effect it's a true refactoring that it does not affect the code so let's demonstrate that let's go down here to
00:22:12.080 mole 3 and inside mole 3 inside mole 3 I'm going to wrap this
00:22:19.880 expression inside a Lambda and then immediately call the Lambda that's the tenant principle and
00:22:26.400 we see that it has no effect on the outcome we still get 33 it is a true refactoring let's do it one more time
00:22:33.600 I'm going to wrap this whole functional expression
00:22:39.440 in a tenant Lambda and this time I'm going to do it with an editor macro just to show that these things truly
00:22:46.360 are mechanical there my editor did it for me
00:22:51.960 and yes we get 33 out of it so the tenant principle very useful in functional refactoring our next
00:22:58.960 refactoring will be to introduce a binding so if I have a Lambda here with
00:23:06.919 no arguments I can add a new argument binding to it uh we'll call it uh
00:23:13.559 Z and then if I add an argument here when I call it I have to give it a value and I can give it any value that I feel
00:23:20.520 like because Z is not used anywhere it doesn't matter what value it takes so I
00:23:26.840 can introduce the argument Z and evaluate that and it's still 33 no
00:23:32.400 effect now there's one rule you have to follow and let's uh demonstrate that
00:23:38.960 here um you have to make sure that anything
00:23:45.600 any variable you add in that you introduce is not free in the expression you're wrapping so down in here we got
00:23:53.480 variable n n is not free because it's bound right here so I could actually reuse n it'd be confusing but I could
00:23:59.760 but f and g are both free variables in this expression they're defined
00:24:05.240 outside so if I were to take F in here and give it an arbitrary value it would
00:24:12.000 die um whereas if I called it n that would work that would work uh generally
00:24:19.159 I'm going to avoid using any used variable at all so uh XY ZZ Y is a good
00:24:24.799 choice there and that works but as long as you stay away from free variables in the expression you're wrapping it
00:24:30.799 doesn't matter what the variable name is uh number three will be a wrap
00:24:37.640 function if I have an expression that is an function of one argument I can wrap
00:24:43.600 that in a Lambda with of one argument and then call the function inside the lamb inside that Lambda and pass the
00:24:50.679 argument down to the call site let's demonstrate here is a function of one
00:24:55.960 argument I can wrap it in a brand new Lambda with an argument of
00:25:01.200 V there it's wrapped then on the inner function that I just wrapped I need to call it immediately and pass V in this
00:25:09.880 essentially what I'm doing is make add now returns a Lambda that has the same
00:25:15.360 signature as the function it was previously returning but it doesn't actually evaluate the the Lambda on the
00:25:21.840 inside until you call it again so it's kind of like a delaying tactic if you don't want to evaluate something right
00:25:27.159 away this is something you can do to do that and you can tell I still get 33 out of the result so function wrapping is a
00:25:34.000 true refactoring one final one you love this
00:25:39.120 one this is inline definition I can take any definition here in this case the
00:25:46.039 definition of make adder and wherever make Adder is called by name I can
00:25:51.440 replace the name of make adder with the
00:25:56.919 definition and let's delete this line here and when I evaluate that same
00:26:04.200 result again this is totally mechanical I can take compose and run the inline
00:26:10.360 refactoring on that say yes replace that I get the same result back oh let's
00:26:17.919 let's go wild with this one in line add one uh no that's part of
00:26:24.399 the name but here's add one yes uh let's inline mole 3
00:26:31.600 there okay one more time
00:26:46.279 oops uh I did promise you the worst Ruby code you'd ever see
00:26:51.520 right that mess let's evaluate it still returns 33
00:27:03.200 now the really interesting thing about this this is a pure Lambda expression there are no assignments anywhere in
00:27:10.360 this the only binding that we do to variable names is through calling these Lambda functions and um we do a lot of
00:27:17.960 calling the Lambda functions and that's that's really ugly and very unreadable and I don't recommend writing code like this but it proves a very important
00:27:24.320 principle that Lambda calculus you know this this this is the goal of what we want to get to in Lambda calculus is to
00:27:30.520 have one big Lambda expression that does this calculation okay enough of the
00:27:39.960 preliminaries seems a shame to write all that just delete it doesn't it let's get back to the problem of
00:27:47.080 recursion and let me grab my factorial thing and let's paste it back here and
00:27:53.080 uncomment so this is what we're dealing with I want to write a factorial function that's recursive
00:27:59.320 and I can't because I cannot refer to factorial inside the definition of factorial because there there are no
00:28:05.960 names for these functions well I could actually there are names they're introduced by Lambda binding so I
00:28:12.440 actually could do this I could say let's create a function that has factorial as an
00:28:17.880 argument and then now factorial will be bound to this and um and let's call this
00:28:26.840 let's call this make factorial factorial okay and then all I have to do to create the factorial function is to call make
00:28:34.840 factorial and all I need to do is pass in the definition of factorial I think about that for just a
00:28:43.480 sec okay I haven't solved the problem yet I've just made it a little I i' I've just introduced some IND Direction
00:28:50.519 there okay so that's not going to work CU to to make a factorial I need the definition of factorial little bit
00:28:56.640 circular logic there I need to do something else well okay maybe maybe I can uh relax the requirements a little
00:29:03.039 bit maybe I don't need a make factorial maybe I need a function that is a factorial improver and instead of taking
00:29:10.440 the definition of factorial as an argument it will take a partial definition of factorial as an argument
00:29:17.480 and by partial I mean a function that acts like factorial over a subset of the
00:29:23.720 possible inputs in other words if I have a factorial function that works from 0
00:29:29.760 to 10 it can calculate the factorial of 0 1 2 3 on up to the factorial of 10 if
00:29:35.320 I pass that partial definition of factorial into my fact improver I will
00:29:40.399 get out of that a new function that works for factorial from 0 to 11 it
00:29:47.039 improves any factorial definition by one step that's kind of
00:29:54.039 cool so uh I need I need I need an error function here so bear with me while I
00:29:59.880 write this okay this is just a function of one
00:30:07.799 argument that throws an error so we can see what's happening now if I factorial
00:30:16.200 improve factorial improver and I call that on error I claim I will get out of
00:30:23.799 this a function I'll call F0 because F0 correctly calculates the factorial of
00:30:29.679 zero
00:30:36.240 oops oh I left this five on there that five should not be in
00:30:41.799 there yes a correctly calculates the factorial of zero all right
00:30:49.840 that's interesting oh but if I can calculate the factorial of zero I can create a
00:30:55.480 function that calculates the factorial of one
00:31:03.440 yeah but F but F1 does not calculate the factorial of two oh but if I got one that calculates
00:31:10.559 one I can write an F2 based on
00:31:16.880 F1 that works for two does it work for three no not at all
00:31:24.320 okay you can you can kind of see where I'm going with this maybe uh let's before I go any further let's inline
00:31:29.440 some of these things so I'm going to do the uh inline refactoring there and
00:31:35.519 there okay and let's call this FX right now not tie it to a particular number
00:31:41.240 and then I'm going to take this from here to here I'm going to cut it and
00:31:49.080 paste it one two three four five times 1 2 3 4 five to balance the
00:31:56.519 parentheses and now FX calculates the factorial of five it'll do 10 it'll do
00:32:05.600 14 but it will not do 15 well I'm getting closer to my
00:32:15.919 goal all I have to do is decide the biggest number I will ever want the factorial
00:32:24.399 of and call fact improver on it that many times okay maybe that's not quite so practical
00:32:30.200 that's not going to get us to the real factorial function okay let's get rid of that let's think about this well first
00:32:37.120 before I go any further let's go ahead and do the whole embed this in a Lambda trick so I'm going to take create a
00:32:42.399 Lambda uh function that expects a factorial improver as an argument and
00:32:49.279 here's the body of that function oops it should be open
00:32:56.240 parenthesis and close parentheses so here here is the body of the
00:33:01.679 function here is where I'm passing in the argument I'm passing in the factorial improver let's just call it
00:33:07.799 improver for right now and then in here I can I can do the same tricks I was
00:33:13.240 doing elsewhere I can say improver do improver do
00:33:18.360 error and if I put this into FX and FX should work for one but it won't work
00:33:25.600 for two nope okay so so this is exactly the same
00:33:30.799 thing I did before except I've embedded it in a Lambda and binding the improver instead of assigning to improver I'm
00:33:37.639 binding to it with Lambda binding um which is what we want to get to
00:33:42.880 anyways improver is interesting improver says I can take any function and prove it by one step I was using this error
00:33:50.679 thing which obviously has nothing to do with factorial at all but I'm wondering if I replaced
00:33:58.639 error with just improver I should get a function that
00:34:05.399 works for factorial of zero it
00:34:11.679 does but if I call factorial of one it should fail in a weird way and the weird
00:34:16.720 way is that it says that proc can't be coerced to a fixed num and the error is happens right here on this line right at
00:34:24.560 this multiply where it's taking n * that and this this partial now is the
00:34:31.320 improver function and improvers expect functions not numbers so of course is not working at all in fact we can make
00:34:38.359 this very much pler if I replace the word partial with improver here since
00:34:45.359 I'm oops sorry about that back down here since I'm passing in
00:34:50.720 improver to improver and this is improver so let's call it improver as
00:34:57.160 the argument I'm actually doing that and and this becomes very plain that improver does not take a numeric argument improver
00:35:03.560 expects a function oh I've got a function laying
00:35:09.320 around let's pass it
00:35:15.920 improver gosh I wonder if this could possibly work well factorial of one is
00:35:22.359 good how about factorial of two oh how about five
00:35:28.680 oh how about 50 about
00:35:34.839 500 I think I go up to 2,000 before I overflow my stack yeah so there
00:35:40.440 factorial of 2,000
00:35:46.000 yep and here you go here is uhu let's let's make this all the way pure Lambda
00:35:51.359 calculus by defining the function and then calling it with the argument five at the end here and we will have a pure
00:35:57.319 lamp to expression that calculates
00:36:11.000 factorial now this is good enough for our goal of proving that Lambda calculus
00:36:17.200 can actually calculate arbitrary mathematical functions uh recursion is
00:36:22.760 no problem for it by doing this little trick of passing these things to it self
00:36:29.040 um it actually will will actually can do recursion with Lambda calculus even
00:36:34.560 though we're Lambda calculus is nothing but Anonymous functions this is mind-blowing to me
00:36:40.440 actually but I'm still not quite happy with this um definition here um there's
00:36:48.359 two things I don't like about it first of all I'm calling this thing improver and it's no longer improver improver
00:36:55.560 took a partial definition this this function is taking something that is not
00:37:01.240 a partial definition so this thing here should not be called improver at all should be called something else so let's
00:37:07.599 replace the name improver with a different name and here I get stuck because I have no common name for the
00:37:15.000 thing that this this argument now is it's no longer an improver function I'm
00:37:20.760 going to go with the name gen because it's a generator that
00:37:25.960 somehow when you feed it it's self when it swallows itself it generates a
00:37:31.520 recursive function um if we can live with that that's what I'm going to call it for the purposes of this
00:37:37.599 demonstration and I can see that I haven't changed anything we still have a working factorial system there so that's
00:37:43.680 the number one thing I didn't like the second thing is that if I were to sit down and write a recursive function it
00:37:51.040 would never in my entire life occur to me to write it in this manner there's
00:37:56.240 lots of mechanics right here involved in just to
00:38:02.680 do the recursion and I want to be if I could get this in a form where I was writing factorial as an improver
00:38:09.599 function improver function makes a lot of sense to me that seems more or less natural at least in the Lambda calculus
00:38:15.359 world if I could get back to the the improver form of this I would I would be really glad so let's see if we can work
00:38:22.119 on this code base just a little bit I'm going to take this inner Lambda right here and I'm going to do the tenant
00:38:29.920 correspondence principle refactoring on it there we go let's break that up just
00:38:36.400 a little bit here so I wrapped this in a Lambda and immediately called the Lambda
00:38:43.480 and it has no effect it does the same thing so we still have a working factorial didn't break anything now I'm
00:38:49.040 going to introduce a binding and uh the variable name I'm
00:38:55.240 going to use is code that's the name of the variable and the value I'm going to pass in will be my error function
00:39:02.000 because remember when you introduce a uh a variable introduce a binding the value doesn't matter it can be anything so
00:39:08.920 there I'm g a function with uh that takes an argument of code and I'm passing in the error function and we're
00:39:15.040 not using Code anywhere so we never trigger the error and it still returns 120 for the factorial 5 okay H well I
00:39:23.640 can pass anything in let's pass in gen hey that still works too oh this you
00:39:29.400 know what this whole gen of gen thing is actually is a function let's call gen of
00:39:36.000 gen and uh oops stack too deep this is what has
00:39:43.280 happened I'm calling gen of gen inside of here and so this entire thing let me
00:39:51.440 Mark this this entire thing right here is the Gen function so when I call gen
00:39:56.839 and pass in gen um it goes and it would call gen of
00:40:02.599 gen inside of here but it only called it if n was not zero so it actually
00:40:10.119 bottomed out it would actually terminate here I'm passing in gen of gen and it always calls gen of gen even when n is
00:40:18.000 zero so it has infinite recursive depth in there and that's no good oh if there
00:40:23.960 only some way of delaying evaluation let's wrap it in a
00:40:31.359 function here's my wrap function argument name will be V so there I have
00:40:37.359 taken gen of gen and replaced it with a Lambda so when I call it it doesn't
00:40:42.920 infinitely recurse it just passes the Lambda in in its place that is functionally equivalent to calling gen
00:40:49.280 of gen and we see this actually works okay next step I got code code is
00:40:58.520 bound to that Lambda that evaluates the Gen of gen and we know that here let's let's go ahead let's go
00:41:05.480 ahead and wrap this as well I see right here from here to here
00:41:13.119 this is the exact same thing that I'm passing in to code so let's just call code
00:41:21.960 instead that works
00:41:27.640 that's interesting let's rename code to partial and all of a sudden out of
00:41:34.280 nowhere that little piece of code right there is our improver function and we've got it
00:41:40.040 back cool but it's still buried in the middle of all this recursive stuff let's see if
00:41:45.839 we can pull it out so out here from here down to here not including the argument
00:41:51.359 call but the entire body of the function I'm going to do a tenant refactoring again that wraps it in a Lambda
00:41:58.520 Let's uh put some line feeds in and pretty up the indentation a little bit
00:42:04.160 there there we go and I'm going to introduce a new binding here again introduce binding and
00:42:12.680 The Binding will be uh code the value will be error again because that worked so well for us last
00:42:18.599 time and that still works that's still 120 okay now I'm going to point out that
00:42:25.079 here is the improver I'm going to copy the improver from here and call
00:42:36.319 oops pass in the improver as the value of
00:42:44.040 code and that still works because we're not using Code but I point out that code is now the same thing as the improver
00:42:50.800 function embedded in here I can replace this now with code and it still is 120
00:42:58.440 and now let's rename code to be
00:43:03.800 improver oops rename code to be
00:43:10.640 mover I I was practicing this this morning I was typing improver so often all of a sudden I started reading
00:43:16.680 reading it as imp Rover and yeah replace those two with
00:43:24.400 improver and we still got 120 out of that that and there we have we have a
00:43:30.720 complete Lambda expression here this part of the code right here deals with the recursive
00:43:37.400 nature of the problem this piece right here is the only piece that knows
00:43:42.520 anything about the definition of factorial so this is really nice this is exactly what I want and now now that I
00:43:49.160 got a complete Lambda expression that does this I'm going to pull the pieces out and name them so we can talk about
00:43:55.040 them reasonably so let's pull this out I'm going to call this uh fact improver
00:44:01.520 again impr Rover and let's uh put it up
00:44:09.839 here fact improver is that nice
00:44:16.040 indentation uh still works no problem let's take out this piece right here I'm
00:44:22.119 going to call this oops I'm going to call this piece y
00:44:30.280 get some nice indentation going on on that oh it's already okay very good and
00:44:35.599 then I'm going to take this out here and I'm going to call this piece fact or
00:44:41.760 factorial and then we'll call factorial right there everything still works and
00:44:47.400 I'm going to clean this code base up just a little bit here streamline it just a wee
00:44:53.200 bit okay and so now I got three pieces let's start with the bottom and work our
00:44:59.079 way up if I so here's a this is this is
00:45:04.119 factorial this is the real factorial function and I prove it by oops prove it by calling factorial 5 and it actually
00:45:10.119 does calculate the factorial 5 if I were to take the factorial function and run
00:45:15.440 it through the fact
00:45:21.280 improver what will come out of that
00:45:27.200 well fact improver takes a partial function and improves it by one step but if I've already got the real factorial
00:45:32.920 function all improver can do is return the factorial
00:45:38.440 function this is indeed the factorial function and I can
00:45:44.319 run this I still get 120 so we're using this definition of factorial now not
00:45:50.359 this one and so that proves that fact improver returns its argument factorial
00:45:57.400 let's write this down factorial is the fix point of fact
00:46:08.359 improver I'm going to say improver now in my head every time I do that factorial is the fix point of fact
00:46:16.400 improver higher order functions have fixed points as well their fix points happen to be functions but that doesn't
00:46:23.319 change the fact that they're fixed points well that's interesting now I'd
00:46:28.720 like to point out that the function y calculates
00:46:35.520 calculates the fix point of an improver
00:46:42.040 function in this case we're calculating the fix point of the fact improver but I could write any recursive function I
00:46:48.359 wanted to and it would calculate the fixed point of that recursive function as long as it's done in an in an
00:46:55.280 improver style I WR could write a Fibonacci improver and that would it
00:47:01.079 would work perfectly well so why calculates that so let's talk about why so why here is actually the Y combinator
00:47:09.280 that we've all heard about and loved well maybe not loved in particular this there's
00:47:16.640 actually many many many versions of the Y combinator and if you go to Wikipedia you will not see this version at all
00:47:24.280 um first of all mathematicians don't like intention revealing
00:47:31.480 names so they call improver F oops too far and they call the generator function
00:47:40.520 I've seen it called G I've also seen it called x uh the Wikipedia article uses X
00:47:45.880 so we will use that here and uh so this is probably more likely the form of the
00:47:51.880 white combinator you'll see with with variable names F and X in it but we haven't changed anything we we're still
00:47:57.680 calculating factorial uh the other issue here is this in particular is the
00:48:04.640 applicative applicative order why combinator uh Ruby
00:48:11.640 is an applicative language in other words it evaluates its arguments before it passes the arguments down into
00:48:17.079 functions uh Ruby is applicative python is applicative um lisp and closure are
00:48:23.960 all applicative languages examples of languages that are not applicative would be hascal hascal is lazy it will
00:48:30.640 evaluate its arguments only at the point it really needs them so there is a version of the Y combinator for normal
00:48:37.440 order languages like hcal and the difference is that you don't have to introduce this wrap function thing right
00:48:45.119 here that we had to do to prevent our infinite stack recursion so that would be the normal order um Y combinator and
00:48:53.440 when you talk about y combinators normally they mean the normal order in the mathematical sense in a language
00:48:59.319 like Ruby we need to use the applicative order version instead the applicative order has another name it's called the Z
00:49:06.359 combinator why these things have so many names I have no idea it's also known as the fixo
00:49:13.640 combinator because it is the combinator that calculates fixed points of functions so there you have it um oh oh
00:49:22.440 oh one more thing one more thing if you again if you go to the Wikipedia page you will not find it ex in exactly this
00:49:28.000 format there's a preferred style they like to write it and uh I'll show you that through two refactorings here uh
00:49:35.040 remember f is really the name of the improver function so if I call F on this x ofx thing uh I'm just improving the
00:49:42.760 factorial function and that is a noop in this term so this still returns 120 no
00:49:48.160 change and then I can also do a function wrap here
00:49:56.960 and we know function wrap doesn't change anything and we can see it doesn't and then if I take off two levels of
00:50:02.799 indentation all of a sudden you see a great symmetry between the body of the function and the argument you're passing
00:50:09.400 in and this is the version you'll probably see if you look it up in Wikipedia or some some math on
00:50:15.040 computational science so there you have it there is the Y combinator derived from first principles
00:50:34.040 wow my brain is dead after that one I started on this journey because I always heard about the Y combinator and
00:50:40.720 I really really really wanted to understand it now people ask oh that's cool how can I use the Y combinator in
00:50:47.160 my own code well if you're if you have named
00:50:52.280 functions uh you don't need the Y combinator if you want to write all your code as Anonymous functions then maybe
00:50:58.040 the Y combinator would be useful but I don't really recommend that what I found interesting though is that by starting
00:51:04.680 with some very basic principles and applying these refactorings I found the the functional refactorings to be very
00:51:10.799 fascinating and by applying that you could take something in one shape and transform it and get it into a different
00:51:17.079 shape that's more appropriate for the needs that you have I've really enjoyed uh playing around with those uh those
00:51:23.200 refactorings in in in that exercise so now you can go home and you can explain
00:51:29.040 to uh your all your co-workers that you have the white you've seen the Y combinator you understand how it's
00:51:36.240 done I think the white commentator is one of those examples of great Beauty in mathematics it's a really interesting
00:51:43.480 function that is theoretical in a lot of respects but comes out of something like
00:51:49.040 Lambda calculus which seems trivial uh a trivial macro replacement type of
00:51:54.400 language but yet Lambda is buried so deep into Ruby we use it all the time
00:52:00.760 without even realizing it it's it's it's one of those things that have a great and profound impact that's one of the
00:52:06.599 things I really enjoyed uh researching this particular topic and I hope you guys enjoyed it as well if you liked
00:52:13.720 this I'm going to recommend a talk called programming with nothing by Tom Stewart Tom uses nothing but lambas uh
00:52:22.160 the stabby procs and calling thereof and writes the phys Buzz application he uses
00:52:28.240 no integers no strings no logic of anything except calling Lambda functions
00:52:34.599 it's a true example of why of Lambda calculus done in Ruby and uh that's a
00:52:40.040 fun just Google programming with nothing and you'll turn up that video I recommend that one so thank you very
00:52:45.400 much you guys have a good day
Jim Weirich
@jimweirich
Explore all talks recorded at RubyConf 2012
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