But... you have to know what a derivative is for in order to be motivated to learn how to do it. If it's all just mindless manipulation, how will one know whether to apply this or that mindless manipulation?
Thanks, that page is nice, but it too emphasizes that you also need a clock. That's essential and it was the point I was trying to make. For example, a thing that is usually glossed over in OS courses (in favor of, let's say, scheduling algorithms and such) is that you simply can't make preemptive multitasking out of pure code - and later when you ask yourself how is it that such a phenomenon is possible in the first place you learn that chips are inherently parallel, that sequential code is an abstraction over that so that one can have some sort of law and order, and only then interrupts enter the scene so that one may break that order when needed, e.g. for preemption.
The title of the course is misleading, as it suggests that NAND gates are the only required primitive, whereas the course later introduces DFF gates, without which you cannot escape the parallelism of chips.
By "first inaccessible ordinal" you mean epsilon_0? (Probably you mean it in the sense of the first one inaccessible by addition, multiplication and exponentiation.) Because there is also a "first recursively inaccessible ordinal", which is much larger (also, not recursive: it's used to construct, by collapsing, the ordinal of Delta12-CA+BI, which is also much larger though recursive).
This reminds me of how disappointed I was in my adolescence by how all airports look the same. Only much later I realized that almost any kind of building has a common design and relies on familiarity and expectations in its potential inhabitants.
I would like to see a mature language using fexprs. They are what I first thought about when I heard the word homoiconicity. Macros seem inelegant in comparison (since there is a separate layer of code that operates on code, and also you don't get self-modifying code, just compile-time transformations).
https://lodev.org/cgtutor/fire.html
which is part of:
https://lodev.org/cgtutor/