ryanartecona

Wow! I'd never heard of gollygang/ready before, but it looks extremely cool. Thanks for sharing.

This reminds me of this other work[1], which is also a fascinating example of emergence from a dynamical system. Instead of a chemical reaction model, it's a model of slime mold growth, as a system of particles and some update rules. They haven't posted new work in a while, but you can still see many video renderings on their twitter[2] using variants of it that are absolutely mesmerizing.

[1] "Physarum" by Sage Jenson https://cargocollective.com/sagejenson/physarum

[2] https://x.com/mxsage

Huge missed opportunity to name this thing `scat`, and claim the poop emoji as a logo.

Seconded. To elaborate, it is essentially a lightly edited transcription of all the lectures of an undergraduate introduction to categories course, complete with diagrams, exercises, and dialogue, and even including students' answers (right and wrong!) to review questions. It's a very unintimidating format, and the book does very well to help a beginner get firm footing with the foundations.

I'll add: if all this seems too opaque to jump into at once (and especially if you're unfamiliar with Haskell or other FP languages), don't give up on FP!

A "functional" language is not always a "pure" language, and a "pure functional" language certainly does not always have dependent types. These concepts build on each other.

A great intro to FP is "Programming in Standard ML". Concise, precise, and very approachable. SML is functional, but not pure nor dependently-typed (though purity is encouraged). http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/smlbook/book.pdf

Haskell is like SML with enforced purity, a different module/typeclass system, and default laziness. LYAH is the best intro. http://learnyouahaskell.com/

Idris is aimed primarily at those already familiar with Haskell, so don't be discouraged if the online REPL feels too foreign!