Thank you! I've written a follow-up article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484016

I’m the author of this article—ask me any questions! :)

This is very interesting.

I wonder though whether it's true that this is how you can teach non-programmers functional programming because the way the emoji puzzles are evaluated is an algorithm expressed in English, but not a very simple one with all the "labels" and "numbers" etc.

I would think this more how you can teach programmers lambda-calculus.

But this is excellent. I wonder if this visual presentation of lambda calculus is your invention or is there some material that predates this?

Thanks for the comment!

> not a very simple one with all the "labels" and "numbers" etc.

I understand this concern. I did have quite a large number of non-technical people do the Japanese version of this course (I have a big following in Japan), and they seemed to actually understand it based on the feedback I got.

The course itself doesn't use any code and is not very fast-paced compared to this article: it spreads out the material covered in this article in 17 pages and takes about 2-3 hours to read.

> I wonder if this visual presentation of lambda calculus is your invention

It's my invention (spent a year tweaking the details) but was inspired by things like Scratch. https://scratch.mit.edu/

Thanks :)

A few hours every night for a week :) But I'm not a dad, haha.

Thank you :) Totally agree, I knew Angular coming into React and it threw me off quite a bit as well.

I'll add a link to it :)

I totally agree, in fact I'm going to link this :) The point I wanted to make is that every feature requires a bit of refactoring like this, whereas React puts some structure.

Thank you :) !

Thanks and oh no, do you know which browser/OS you're using? Not sure if it's the JSBin thing...

Edit: I think it has to do with JSBin. I reported the issue here: https://github.com/jsbin/jsbin/issues/2464

Same here [1].

    $ lsb_release -a
    No LSB modules are available.
    Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
    Description:	Ubuntu 14.10
    Release:	14.10
    Codename:	utopic

    $ google-chrome --version
    Google Chrome 43.0.2357.132

[1] https://imgur.com/JN5PlqN

Thanks! Looks like the issue is with JSBin embed. I reported it here:

https://github.com/jsbin/jsbin/issues/2464

I'm getting this issue as well. Using Firefox 39 on OS X.

Will investigate! Sorry about this.

Edit: It might have to do with JSBin. I reported it here: https://github.com/jsbin/jsbin/issues/2464

Same here, Firefox 38 on Lubuntu 12.04

Sorry about this, it might have to do with JSBin. I reported it here. https://github.com/jsbin/jsbin/issues/2464

Firefox on OSX, version 39.

Safari, OSX

Thank you so much! :) I also found that a blog format is much easier to consume than a REPL/in-browser editor based one.

It is, but the tutorial could have made good use of pagination or anchors, so one could bookmark where one has left off.

Also: What's the deal with "the cow above"?

I think thats a joke on the cow printed on the ORielly book (also about React)

Yes, I am going to implement pagination next (with React)!