Use Lambda Calculus To Think About Functional Programming

<p>I can hear it now: &ldquo;Nerd!&rdquo;</p> <p>I guess it is nerdy to write an article on lambda calculus. But hear me out.</p> <p>I learned about lambda calculus this past semester. It was covered in a course called Principles of Programming Languages. Learning this formal system was supposed to help us students understand functional programming. In other words, to get comfortable with:</p> <ul> <li>Programs made by applying functions instead of running statements in some order.</li> <li>Functions reading in other functions as arguments.</li> <li>Functions returning other functions.</li> </ul> <p>Lambda calculus certainly helped me with that. Plus, it presented me with a totally new way of expressing programming constructs.</p> <p>So, let&rsquo;s talk briefly about lambda calculus and why it&rsquo;s useful.</p> <h1>What is lambda calculus?</h1> <p>Lambda calculus was developed by&nbsp;Alonzo Church&nbsp;in the 1930s. It is a system of defining everything as functions. Objects are functions. Operations are functions. Numbers are functions.</p> <p>This is less complicated than one might think.</p> <p>Lambda calculus follows certain syntactical rules to define these things. Valid expressions in lambda calculus are called lambda terms.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/geekculture/use-lambda-calculus-to-think-about-functional-programming-4734f80e7714">Visit Now</a></p>