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I never understood this obsession with lambda calculus or ycombinator. If most o... | Hacker News

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It's a very foundational thing--at the foundation of theoretical computer science and a lot of programming languages. Understanding it pays a lot of dividends over your life--even if you don't use it directly. By now it's a mandatory course at many CS universities anyway--so that tells you how foundational it is. >If most of the computers have an instruction set that is rich and has support for loops and types and other things, what use is it to waste your time to understand this? Because lambda calculus is much simpler than that and still can do everything. As an engineer you strive for simplicity, right? Lambda calculus is so simple, you can learn it (all of it!) in a week. You will be able to compute everything that can be computed--WITHOUT having jumps, loops, types, instruction sets, numbers, booleans, lists and so on at the foundation. The foundation is function definition and function calls. The argument is a function, and so is the result. It's functions all the way down. You m

I never understood this obsession with lambda calculus or ycombinator. If most o... | Hacker News Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login innagadadavida on Aug 29, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: An intriguing discovery of Computer Science: The Y... I never understood this obsession with lambda calculus or ycombinator. If most of the computers have an instruction set that is rich and has support for loops and types and other things, what use is it to waste your time to understand this? It’s like reading poetry perhaps? There is no goal but just to come up

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