lambda calculus

[dr4b]

Last night around 3am Eli decided to teach me about lambda calculus. He said it would take 5 minutes. It didn't. Although I find that I still remember enough of LISP for it to make a little bit of sense to me. I guess I wish I caught on to things like that a lot faster.

Comments

[mh75.livejournal.com]

Lambda calculus is not exactly trivial.

I started wanting to learn it once, and then got distracted. I still don't entirely understand.

I wish i caught on to these things much more quickly too, so i understand how you feel. Still, you probably shouldn't judge yourself to harshly because it took you an entire night to learn something that most people will never even know about in their entire lives.

[beegle.livejournal.com]

I don't understand formal lambda calculus, either. I've written plenty of programs that use it, and I can understand most of the stuff that others write, but I've never been able to abstract it properly.

I had the same problem when we started to learn algebra in elementary school. My brain immediately went "Oh! Like BASIC!" and refused to cope with algebra in the abstract. Building a second mental map that was 90% similar to the first was harder than starting from scratch.

I wonder if learning a few new languages that implement lambda calc. differently would help.