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William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [PWL NYC]

PapersWeLove · 367.4K views · 2017-05-24 · 1:31:06

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Overview

William Byrd presents at Papers We Love NYC on what he calls the most beautiful program ever written, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp. He walks through the metacircular interpreter and related ideas, and demos relational programming and program synthesis near the end.

On Hacker News

HN repeatedly recommends it as an amazing talk that derives the essence of Lisp and shows miniKanren-style program synthesis.

Recommended by 11 HN people across 12 months · HN mentions 2017–2026

Topics

Functional programmingCompilers, interpreters & program analysis
Search by tags
lispschememinikanrenprogram synthesisrelational programminginterpreters

What people said

hazbo · 2021-08 · Strong recommendation

I can't recommend the talk Dr Byrd did on this enough: [VIDEO] It's one of my favorite programs to play around with. I wrote about an Erlang implementation of this a short while back: [LINK]

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uptheroots · 2021-06 · Strong recommendation

One of my all time favorite YouTube videos is a lecture by William Byrd. I find myself still coming back to this video, it was so fascinating to me as an undergrad. [VIDEO]

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BoiledCabbage · 2020-04 · Strong recommendation

If you haven't watched it - check out William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [VIDEO] It's the above and deriving it. It is fascinating to think of it as the essence of a language in 13 lines.

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Sources

Video by PapersWeLove, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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