Our professor in first semester (computer science) briefly touched lambda calculus in a lecture, but of course back then all you see is a bunch of strange thing

Our professor in first semester (computer science) briefly touched lambda calculus in a lecture, but of course back then all you see is a bunch of strange things with no idea what it actually is. What's needed to understand is probably a little background in functional programming and a little interest in the topic to dig deeper. I once came across a nice example that gradually transformed a normal Ruby program into such a monstrosity, while explaining everything along the way: http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing Side note: I roughly understand some principles of all that but in no way good enough to actually write code that way. Specifically I still cannot come up with a Y combinator definition (and right now work time limits my opportunity of reading the article completely).