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by kettunen 1328 days ago
While Common Lisp is my favourite programming language, I didn’t necessarily get the Eureka moment by just programming in it (although I understood quite early how the interactive REPL driven way of programming is superior to any other form of programming) but instead when I started to learn more about lambda calculus. Then it really clicked for me.
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The Eureka moment for me was when I realized that I can express LET in terms of LAMBDA. And why stop there? I can express DEFUN in terms of LAMBDA too. All of the code is just LAMBDAs and LAMBDAs. That's when it really clicked for me!
So did I, for instance here: http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=concepts

When I discovered that I could forget the cons, car, cdr of LISP and rebuild them from the ground, the lambda-calculus, a very basic "text rewriting" tool, the Swiss knife of the code, the TAO of code ...