[ngriffiths]

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a much more clear and concise way to introduce it, but on the other hand, the topic doesn't seem all that useful to someone without exposure to some fundamentals, so it seems fine to me if it has a bunch of jargon. Lambda calculus programs that actually do something useful are extremely weird and hard to read and write, even very simple ones, so that's not where its value comes from. Probably a better thing to learn in connection with stuff like interpreter and compiler design when it isn't weird to say "function application" and expect you to know what that is.

[lupire]

The host site plato.stanford.edu is an encyclopedia written by academics, and suffers from academic culture's predeliction for abstruse writing as false precision.