alt.hn

2/28/2026 at 6:04:05 AM

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

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

by bntr

2/28/2026 at 6:05:48 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

by bntr

3/3/2026 at 12:18:04 AM

Here's another from a long time ago: https://dkeenan.com/Lambda/

by discarded1023

3/3/2026 at 6:01:41 AM

I like this catalog: https://github.com/prathyvsh/lambda-calculus-visualizations

And it seems that John Tromp's diagrams originate from David C. Keenan's Mockingbird (1996),

and Bubble Notation comes from Wayne Citrin's Visual Expressions (1995)

by bntr

3/3/2026 at 7:52:47 AM

Thanks for the link! Some very pretty stuff there.

Missing AFAICT are categorical string diagrams. I'm only sort-of familiar with the notation for Haskell Arrows [1,2] but a quick google for "lambda calculus string diagrams" turns up some recent work by Dan Ghica and others that may be of interest.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_diagram

[2] Ross Paterson "A New Notation for Arrows" (2001)

by discarded1023

3/3/2026 at 12:43:03 AM

2swap has some incredible videos

by the_cat_kittles

3/3/2026 at 10:47:56 AM

Really cool approach. The "Ollama for classical ML" framing makes it instantly clear what this does.

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.

by recognity

3/3/2026 at 11:15:45 AM

Seems like it went to the wrong post.

by bntr