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Show HN: Visual Lambda Calculus – a thesis project (2008) revived for the web

37 points • by bntr • last Saturday at 6:04 AM • 5 comments • view on HN

Originally built as my master's thesis in 2008, Visual Lambda is a graphical environment where lambda terms are manipulated as draggable 2D structures ("Bubble Notation"), and beta-reduction is smoothly animated.

I recently revived and cleaned up the project and published it as an interactive web version: https://bntre.github.io/visual-lambda/

GitHub repo: https://github.com/bntre/visual-lambda

It also includes a small "Lambda Puzzles" challenge, where you try to extract a hidden free variable (a golden coin) by constructing the right term: https://github.com/bntre/visual-lambda#puzzles

Comments

bntr • last Saturday at 6:05 AM

For comparison: factorial(3) visualized in two different notations.

John Tromp's Lambda Diagrams (via 2swap): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVA8Nj6HEo&t=1346s

Bubble Notation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgu8S3Pnb8

➕ show 2 replies
bntr • yesterday at 10:52 AM

You can also construct your own puzzles and share them via URL.

Example: https://bntre.github.io/visual-lambda/#workspace=H4sIAAAAAAA...