fragmentary ideas ䷿ intellectual what-nots ䷷ and haskell programming ䷴

If the title hasn't scared you off yet, here's the story: I was hacking on someone else's code on the plane and trying to wrap my head around some Applicative class code; in particular the code in question used the Applicative instance for ((->) a) i.e. functions. This turned my brain to cream-of-wheat and I had to take a break.

If you aren't familiar with Applicative Functors, they are somewhere in between the familiar and simple Functor class and the Monad class; an abstraction for function application with a context. Check out here for more.
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Computer science is a fascinating and maddening thing. Even the most seemingly-esoteric topics turn out to be fundamental. Go out to the fringes of CS and you find yourself smack in the middle of Philosophy. You try to understand a single point and you suddenly find yourself embracing everything.

So this post comes from that infinitely-recursive rabbit hole of wikipedia topics I’ve been falling down for the last few weeks, and you can probably expect a few more like this one; I’ll try to keep focused.

We begin (as do All Good Things) with the Untyped Lambda Calculus:
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