Top all-time · #15881
Sean Hunter
Personal blog · uncarved.com/articlesprogrammingsystems
Sean Hunter writes The Uncarved Block, a personal blog at uncarved.com about programming and systems. Since 2013, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times, most often “Partial Function Application is not Currying”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Cited on HN as a source for the currying versus partial application distinction, and also linked for a cavitation cold-brew method, shell tips and a restaurant ordering system. Comments cite it without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Sean Hunter's personal blog, containing software, haskell, scala, ocaml, unix tips and sundry other things.
Most-linked posts?
- Partial Function Application is not Currying3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-01-28
- /articles/not-currying/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-21
What Hacker News says?
This is awesome in an overengineered way, but if you want to make cold brew the normal way it's very easy. Basically you make it using a cafetière/French press/Bodum[1] using cold tap water in the fridge overnight (probably put some cling film over it), then press it and run it through a drip filter. The secret (if there is one) is to use fine ground coffee like you would use for an espresso rather than coarse groun…
Comment linking /articles/cold-brew/
on “Cold brew coffee in 3 minutes using acoustic cavitation”Submitted Partial Function Application is not Currying as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's also wrong :) http://www.uncarved.com/blog/not_currying.mrk Which the author freely admits: (Some will insist that what we're doing is more properly called "partial application", and that "currying" should be reserved for the cases where the resulting functions take one parameter, each resolving to a separate new function until all the required parameters have been supplied. They can please feel free to keep on…
Comment linking /blog/not_currying.mrk
on “How currying leads to elegant, readable code”This is a bit of a personal bugbear, but partial function application is not currying. I wrote a blog post on this a while ago because it's such a common misconception. https://www.uncarved.com/articles/not-currying/ The link you posted is just using the word wrong. Currying is not syntactic sugar for partial application, it is the opposite. (ie currying builds functions which take multiple arguments from chains of…
Comment linking /articles/not-currying/
on “More intuitive partial function application in Python”> Yes. Why not? ...because I think you'd write mathematical history if you can prove it? > You're approaching this conversation with your own preconceived notions about what the words mean... Peak meta, yes! > ...to force your preferred usage of the words on other people. Listen, currying is a defined term[0], as is partial application [1]. Those are primarily mathematic definitions, and your choice of words "...is…
Comment linking /articles/not-currying/
on “Currying”No it is not. For an explanation see http://www.uncarved.com/blog/not_currying.mrk
Comment linking /blog/not_currying.mrk
on “Can we stop calling it currying?”You are most welcome. Probably hundreds but I don't know what you don't know. It's worth learning some old-school command-line history fu as well because that is often useful. I've written up some things I have found helpful here[1] One thing which is not in the writeup but should be (and I mention it in a sibling thread) is "rlwrap" which is a readline wrapper which imbues whatever program with readline editing and…
Comment linking /articles/unix/
on “You probably don't need Oh My Zsh”If it makes you feel any better, Newark's restaurant ordering system was terrible right from when they replaced all the restaurants and added those IPads at every seat even before they threw QR codes into the mix. I wrote a blog post about it in around 2014 or so (ignore the update date - that was me resurrecting the blog after a server failure) https://www.uncarved.com/articles/falafel/
Comment linking /articles/falafel/
on “People hate QR-code menus. Now restaurants are ditching them”