So did I. It was interesting, but didn’t really make me want to know more.
> the combinators, brainfuck and so on have something magical to me
Right, so in other words, it was because it’s interesting. Which is fine and something I said from from the start:
> Is It useful in any way? Is it just a curiosity? Does it develop your thinking? Any reason is fine (…)
I understand it can be interesting by itself (“Is it just a curiosity?”), I explicitly wanted to know if there’s something beyond that, which the article doesn’t say.
I think there is something beyond that, but possibly not for you.
Just like philosophy possibly isn't directly useful to you or men on the moon or a thousand other things that other people find fascinating, and useful to them.
What is useful to you is entirely yours, it is informed by your past and it is shaping your outlook of the future. So in that sense you could write that comment about anything that you find interesting but are not actually interested in, in the sense that you would pursue the thing for its own sake. It is probably better to approach such things in the same way that you would approach art: it may not be useful to you but if it is just interesting then that's enough.
The utility of a statue is very limited, though I guess technically you can hit someone over the head with a stone arm as a stand-in club. But that's not why statues are made. Sometimes the ability to wonder or observe is the utility and if you don't want to end up in a nihilistic place (nothing has ultimate utility on account of the heat death of the universe) then that may help you to appreciate the journey and the views rather than just the 'what's in it for me angle'.
For me the utility of these really low level computing abstractions lies in the fact that I have been wondering for a long time how I could compile a piece of software into a generic piece of hardware. These combinators are simple enough that they can be expressed with a gatecount that is low enough that I can make something more than just a counter (which I could do directly with fewer gates).
This is in turn related to cellular automata, computing fabrics and so on. If you aren't interested in any of those then there is zero utility here.
So did I. It was interesting, but didn’t really make me want to know more.
> the combinators, brainfuck and so on have something magical to me
Right, so in other words, it was because it’s interesting. Which is fine and something I said from from the start:
> Is It useful in any way? Is it just a curiosity? Does it develop your thinking? Any reason is fine (…)
I understand it can be interesting by itself (“Is it just a curiosity?”), I explicitly wanted to know if there’s something beyond that, which the article doesn’t say.