Sacrificial RabbitCode. Art. Perversion. Madness.

Monday, October 23. 2006

Lambda is my memento mori

Scheme

The Human
Skull has a Major
anthropological point
called the 'lambda'.

It is easy (easy by Unix, not Apple/Microsoft standards) to configure a Linux machine so that it will go directly into a GUI when you boot it up. This way, you never see a tty screen at all. I still have mine boot into the white-on-black teletype screen however, as a computational memento mori. It used to be fashionable for a writer to keep a human skull on his desk as a reminder that he was mortal, that all about him was vanity. The tty screen reminds me that the same thing is true of slick user interfaces.
—Neil Stephenson, In the Beginning... was the Commandline

Greg asked me on IRC the other day why I tend to write functions in scheme as
(define foo (lambda (bar) ... )) instead of
(define (foo bar) ... )?

It was then that I realized it was my Memento Mori. It is my way of saying to myself "functions are just values that can be bound to names like anything else".
Posted by jonnay in Scheme at 22:23 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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