To the other fine replies, I'd add what I posted elsewhere: Have you actually tried to implement things in lambda calculus? Until you do it won't ever really cl

To the other fine replies, I'd add what I posted elsewhere: Have you actually tried to implement things in lambda calculus? Until you do it won't ever really click. That said, to be clear, I haven't and I don't plan to, so don't read this as a moralistic claim that you "should" do this. To the extent that I care about lambda calculus itself at all, it is that I accept it as yet another Turing-complete representation, and then move on, because it's only marginally more useful to write things in lambda calculus than in Turing machines directly. This is a true logical if-then statement: If you want to understand this, then you'll need to actually work with it for a bit. But I have no comment as to whether you should want that.