The Y Combinator

Mike Vanier while explaining How to Succeed at Recursion Without Really Recursing back in 2008

…it’s worth your while to know something about Y for the following reasons:

  • It’s one of the most beautiful ideas in all of programming. If you have any sense of programming aesthetics, you’re sure to be delighted by Y.

  • It shows in a very stark way how amazingly powerful the simple ideas of functional programming are.

This is a must read for every functional programmer out there (or I should say any programmer who want to learn how to design solutions to problems).

It’s long (as it should be), clear and enlightening. Wish one of those 500 Monad explanations also can be such beautifully explained