Yay, I have a new project for this weekend! For those who missed it, he has a github project at (https://github.com/tomstuart/nothing) where you can reimplement this yourself, with some tips to help you out.
I especially like how he neither uses a fancy academic language which people can dismiss outright for not being practical - like Haskell. But neither do you need ridiculous amounts of boilerplate that obscures the message - like in Java. Ruby is used for real stuff and doesn't have pretentious academic baggage.
> a fancy academic language which people can dismiss outright for not being practical - like Haskell
Actually that could be a good way to filter your audience. Some of those who would be least likely to appreciate this tutorial (and would be likely to post comments complaining how pointless (no pun intended) it was) would avoid a Haskell article in the first place.
This is n=1, of course, but I'm tremendously interested in the subject matter and superficially interested in Haskell. Yet, I don't work with Haskell on a daily basis, so when I see something non-trivial in Haskell, I skim it or put it aside to read later when I have time for study.
Whereas if it's in Ruby, JavaScript, or CoffeeScript, I try to read it immediately. So don't forget the class of slackers who mean to get around to Haskell fluency one day, but not today. We have a great interest in the subject matter and like Haskell in principle even if we're lazy(!) about evaluating Haskell code examples.
true, if you're optimising for an academic discourse. But that also limits its accessibility for any potentially interested who don't know the academic language. I can't be the only one who stopped reading an Ocaml paper merely for not knowing Ocaml. Its clear he's optimising for knowledge transfer as he spent the time to not only post code on github, but provide different branches for those with different backgrounds.
I think this tutorial shows what we really mean about Turing equivalence in languages, about how data structures can be represented as functions, and presents a wider point of view that opens up other possible program designs.
I especially like how he neither uses a fancy academic language which people can dismiss outright for not being practical - like Haskell. But neither do you need ridiculous amounts of boilerplate that obscures the message - like in Java. Ruby is used for real stuff and doesn't have pretentious academic baggage.
Edit: spelling.