Lambda? You Keep Using that Letter

on YouTube ↗01h 06m

" summary

Lambdas originate in 1930s lambda calculus and mean variable + abstraction + application, not “make a language functional”; Church shows numbers as functions (zero = λf.λx.x) and booleans/pairs/lists follow. The talk builds Church numerals in JavaScript and in modern C++ (using auto/lexical_cast), defines a square as higher‑order application, and implements an immutable persistent stack from closures; everything evaluates correctly. Timeline specifics: Church 1932/1936, Lisp 1960, C++ lambdas 2011, Java 2014.

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" chapters (5)

1. 0:00Start
2. 21:47Excel is the world's most popular functional language Simon Peyton-Jones
3. 24:12Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 68
4. 38:54calculus was the first object-oriented language.
5. 44:10One of the most powerful mechanisms for program structuring [...] is the block and procedure concept.

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