"Lambda Calculus is perhaps the Maxwell's equations of computability, not of the computer field." I agree with you. "What Kay might have meant is that Lisp is

"Lambda Calculus is perhaps the Maxwell's equations of computability, not of the computer field." I agree with you. "What Kay might have meant is that Lisp is the Maxwell's equations of programming a computer to do something useful." But what I discovered is that lambda calculus + S-expressions define a consistent infrastructure on which useful superstructures can be built, data structures (pairs, trees, lists,...) and data controls (recursion). And make implementation a pleasure, either via AST (lambda code) or via regexps {lambda talk}.