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Marvin Borner
Personal blog · text.marvinborner.demathprogramming
Marvin Borner writes Text, a personal blog at text.marvinborner.de about math and programming. Since 2023, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “The Bruijn Programming Language”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this post as the explanation of the Bruijn language's syntax and of De Bruijn numerals, where variables are referred to by abstraction level rather than by name.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Articles and blog posts about some of my projects.
Most-linked posts?
- The Bruijn Programming Language4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-04-08
- Lambda Screen: Fractals in pure lambda calculus2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-08
What Hacker News says?
The Bruijn language is a really cool language that takes some of theae ideas to the extreme and fundamentals. Variables aren't named, they are beta reduced and referred to by abstraction level. https://text.marvinborner.de/2023-04-06-01.html
Comment linking /2023-04-06-01.html
on “Why do we need modules at all? (2011)”Submitted Lambda Screen: Fractals in pure lambda calculus as a story · 142 points
HN discussionQuadtrees are also quite useful for generating fractals. A very related project of mine, Lambda Screen [0], explores this by encoding these functional quadtrees directly in lambda calculus and rendering the structure based on Church booleans being true (white) or false (black). With fixed point recursion, this allows for very tiny definitions of IFS fractals. For example, fractals like the Sierpinski triangle/carpet…
Comment linking /2024-03-25-02.html
on “Functional Quadtrees”Submitted Crafting formulas: Lambdas all the way down as a story · 129 points
HN discussionLooking at https://text.marvinborner.de/2023-04-06-01.html helped me understand the syntax a bit (though I'm just a non-theoretical programmer). I was confused about what <4> = \lambda ^ 5 4 meant, since it already seemed to have a "4" in it. The trick is that the 4 seems to be similar to a positional argument index, but numbered inside out. IOW, in this encoding, <4> is a function that can be called 5 times (the ex…
Comment linking /2023-04-06-01.html
on “De Bruijn Numerals”Submitted De Bruijn Numerals as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThis is used to represent number in the bruijn programming language [1] [2]. [1] https://text.marvinborner.de/2023-04-06-01.html [2] https://bruijn.marvinborner.de/
Comment linking /2023-04-06-01.html
on “Balanced Ternary”Submitted Many Factorials in Lambda Calculus as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThey are not functions, but variables. Maybe this helps, as they basically are "selectors": https://text.marvinborner.de/2024-11-18-00.html#tagged-union...
Comment linking /2024-11-18-00.html
on “Extraordinary Ordinals”Submitted Tiny, Untyped Monads as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Extraordinary Ordinals as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Squeezing π from 122 Bits of Lambda Calculus as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lambda Screen: Fractals in Pure Lambda Calculus as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Dual View on Syntax as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted De Bruijn Numerals as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Squeezing Pi from 122 Bits of Lambda Calculus as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Metaprogramming and self-interpretation of lambda calculus as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Bruijn Programming Language as a story · 2 points
HN discussion