Show HN: Visual Lambda Calculus – a thesis project (2008) revived for the web (github.com)
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
6 comments
[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] threadJohn Tromp's Lambda Diagrams (via 2swap): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVA8Nj6HEo&t=1346s
Bubble Notation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRgu8S3Pnb8
Example: https://bntre.github.io/visual-lambda/#workspace=H4sIAAAAAAA...
I've been building CLI-first tools myself and the pattern of wrapping complex workflows into simple terminal commands is underrated. Most devs I know would rather type one command than spin up a Jupyter notebook for a quick prediction.
Curious about the model format — do you plan to support a registry where people can publish pre-trained models, like Ollama's library? That would be the killer feature for adoption.