Addressing your points individually: 1) On its own, Plumb is exactly an implementation of Lambda Calculus (like an extremely simplified form of Scheme or Haske

Addressing your points individually: 1) On its own, Plumb is exactly an implementation of Lambda Calculus (like an extremely simplified form of Scheme or Haskell); its only novelty is its syntax, which makes it embeddable in scripting languages. It may be unfamiliar, but it's mainly useful for defining functions which shuffle their arguments around and pass them on to other functions. 2) Everything takes time to learn. Thankfully, Plumb has few rules, and they're applied consistently. 3) Nothing is "added", in the sense of Turing-completeness. Plumb is meant to work around awkward function-definition syntax. Some more sensible examples might be the following: $compose = plumb([[[2 , __(1 , 0)]]]); $z = plumb([[1, [1, 1, 0]], [1, [1, 1, 0]]]); These functions are really simple: compose functions and find a fixed-point. Compare them to raw PHP: $compose = function($f, $g) { return function($x) use ($f, $g) { return $f($g($x)); }; }; $z = function($f) { return call_user_func(function($x) use ($f) { return $f(function($v) use ($x) { return call_user_func($x($x), $v); }); }, function($x) use ($f) { return $f(function($v) use ($x) { return call_user_func($x($x), $v); }); }); }; I've also written a blog post which introduces Plumb incrementally, in the context of PHP: http://chriswarbo.net/posts/2014-08-18-edsl.html http://chriswarbo.net/posts/2014-08-18-edsl.html