I always believed that one can never learn the essence of anything without reinventing it. Once you reinvent things, you will never forget them — because otherwise you can just re-reinvent them.
Today I found that I forgot how to derive the defintion of the Y combinator. I learned it several years ago from an online article, but now the search term “Y combinator” gives me all the news about startups (sigh). I tried for two hours, but still couldn’t make the leap from the “poor man’s Y” to “Y”. Finally, I opened my good old friend The Little Schemer. Alas. Chapter 9 tells me exactly how to reinvent Y. Thank you Dan Friedman and Matthias Felleisen.
To prevent myself from forgetting how to derive Y again, I made a slide to record my understanding of it. I hope it can be of help to people (including the future me). So here it is.
