[Gabriel439]

The point of the post wasn't to explain that Church encoding is a replacement for the visitor pattern. The purpose of the post was to explain that the visitor pattern is essentially the same thing as Church encoding (thus the title of the post), because I noticed a lot of people were not appreciating that connection between the two.

[skybrian]

That's fine, but it seems like some of the confusion comes from unclear expectations? There is a vague promise at the beginning of the post that this will somehow be useful for programming:

"This post also explains how you can usefully employ the visitor pattern / Church encoding / Böhm-Berarducci encoding to expand your programming toolbox."