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

[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.