[matt-noonan]

This is exactly right. The relevant quote from the article is this:

> The reason we care about Church-encoding is because not all programming languages natively support sum types or recursion (although most programming languages support product types in the form of records / structs).

> However, most programming languages do support functions, so if we have functions then we can use them as a “backdoor” to introduce support for sum types or recursion into our language. This is the essence of the visitor pattern: using functions to Church-encode sum types or recursion into a language that does not natively support sum types or recursion.