Lambda? You Keep Using that Letter
summary
Starts from Church 1936 and traces concrete artifacts: the three core lambda constructs are variables, abstraction, application, closures are lambdas that capture free variables, and Scheme (1975) popularizes lexical closures. Demonstrates Church numerals rebuilt in JavaScript and uses them to square 7 (result 49), cites Algol 68/ Lisp/Smalltalk examples, contrasts real lambdas with Java/C#/C++ variants, and shows a Ruby fizzbuzz built from nothing using pure lambda encodings.
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chapters (4)
- 0:00Start
- 13:25They're anonymous, little functional spies sneaking into the rest of your code.
- 14:05Excel is the world's most popular functional language Simon Peyton-Jones
- 33:45One of the most powerful mechanisms for program structuring [...] is the block and procedure concept.
