Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Clarence1898 wrote:
>
> > Since I am unfamiliar with lambda calculus, not being taught in the FORTRAN
> > class I took at college, I looked it up on wikipedia.  After a few paragraphs,
> > my eyes glazed over and could no longer focus.
>
> In seriousness now...
>
> A Turing machine (as you may or may not know) is a "computer" simplified
> down to the barest essentials. It turns out, the simpler a machine
> becomes, the harder it becomes to program it.
>
> [Strictly, a *universal* Turing machine is a simplified programmable
> computer, if you want to nitpick.]
>
> Similarly, the Lambda calculus is sort of the simplest possible
> programming language. And again, it turns out the simpler the language
> is, the harder it is to program anything with it!
>

Last night after work, I took another look at the lambda calculus article.  I
think I get the gist of it.  It is simple enough to be practically impossible
to write any useful program with it.

> Now if you REALLY WANT TO MAKE YOUR HEAD FRIGGIN HURT... Try the SKI
> combinator calculus.

I didn't even try to look this on up.

> IF YOU WANT TO TOTALLY BREAK YOUR MIND, you may try the Iota calculus.

Or this one.

The lambda calculus was somewhat interesting, but outside of some mathematicians
and computer scientists, I don't know how anyone could ever use it.  Now if you
could think of a way I could use it to get a few programmers off my back, I'll
take another look at it.

Isaac

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