PapersWeLove
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2017–2026
1:31:06 · 367K views · May 24, 2017
William Byrd presents at Papers We Love NYC on what he calls the most beautiful program ever written, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp. He walks through the metacircular interpreter and related ideas, and demos relational programming and program synthesis near the end.
HN repeatedly recommends it as an amazing talk that derives the essence of Lisp and shows miniKanren-style program synthesis.
17 comments from Hacker News
(define eval-expr (lambda (expr env) (pmatch expr [`,x (guard (symbol? x)) (env x)] [`(lambda (,x) ,body) (lambda (arg) (eval-expr body (lambda (y) (if (eq? x y) arg (env y)))))] [`(,rator ,rand) ((eval-expr rator env) (eval-expr rand env))]))) There's an amazing talk about it: this video
If you haven't watched it - check out William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" this video It's the above and deriving it. It is fascinating to think of it as the essence of a language in 13 lines.
I can't recommend the talk Dr Byrd did on this enough: this video It's one of my favorite programs to play around with. I wrote about an Erlang implementation of this a short while back: [LINK]
One of my all time favorite YouTube videos is a lecture by William Byrd. I find myself still coming back to this video, it was so fascinating to me as an undergrad. this video
As for what miniKanren is, there are a couple of books (one being Byrd's dissertation) and a lot of papers. I think maybe the best summary I've read is actually the interview transcript at [LINK] . But also, there's a summary on [LINK] , with links to the papers and talks, and an older summary on [LINK] . Most of these are a bit hard to understand the significance of if you aren't already familiar with logic programming. The talk on this video is a popular description of one of the most astonishing results; I haven't watched it but people tell me it's good. As for understanding academia, yeah, I don't know.