Lambda Calculus For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Learn It - part 1 of 2
summary
Builds a working lambda calculus inside the browser: uses ES6 arrow functions and a few translation helpers to encode booleans, Church numerals, arithmetic, and the Y combinator, then reduces a factorial (factorial 2 computes correctly). Claims to recreate Turing-complete computation from functions alone, shows the actual encodings and reduction steps, and runs them in the JavaScript console so the exercises and code are copy‑paste runnable.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 5:00You can do this
- 9:28The whole language
- 16:49Substitution
- 20:41combinators
- 22:48true and false
- 26:40Reducing expressions
- 31:57Functions of values
- 35:00Arithmetic
- 36:09Y Combinator
- 38:03Factorial Reduction
- 41:10Proof
- 44:33Workshop
- 47:40Testing
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