Use Lambda Calculus To Think About Functional Programming
<p>I can hear it now: “Nerd!”</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’s talk briefly about lambda calculus and why it’s useful.</p>
<h1>What is lambda calculus?</h1>
<p>Lambda calculus was developed by Alonzo Church 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>
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