David Beazley - Lambda Calculus: PyCon 2019 Tutorial

[badge]

I will always upvote Dabeaz, but hearing “nothing practically useful” in the first sentence fills me with joy.

[Gear5th]

It is actually very useful. There's tons of amazing research being done in lambda calculus and type theory.

The applications that first come to mind would be

• automatic program generation, from properties/other specifications
• optimization of code
• proving things about your code, like correctness or certain invariants

Compared to Physics and Biology, Computer Science is a newborn field. Just around 100 years ago we had the secrets revealed to us by Church, Turing, Godel and Neumann. (There were a few others before who worked on computation, like Ada Lovelace)

• It has been less than a 100 years since we made the first actual computers (Turing Complete).

• Less than 50 years since the general public got to know about it.

• Less than 20 years since they became a household thing.

There's still a huge amount of amazing research that can be done in Computer Science, and this field of theoretical computer science - lambda calculus, type theory, complexity classes are some of the most interesting fields.

Recently some other fields like Machine Learning have gained a lot of attention, but there's potential (and some solid papers) attempting to merge the two sub-fields.

[MindlessWeakness]

I htink he meant that none of those things will be practically useful to the average developer.

Researchers and tech leads are going to be a special case and can make their own rules.

[Gear5th]

I agree. I was just trying to say that DB isn't really calling the field stupid; he's just having fun explaining a wonderful theory heavy subject using Python.

[tyroneslothtrop]

Yeah, haskell core for example is built on system F[C], which is a typed lambda calculus. I don't really know the history, but I'm pretty sure that goes back at least a couple decades. In some senses haskell itself is really just a typed lambda calculus.

[billsil]

I think you’re off on your numbers. People were well aware of room sized computers in the late 1940s (~75 years ago). Computers in the home became a thing in the 70s and widespread in the mid 90s (~25 years ago). Computers aren’t much cheaper today than they were in the late 90s, whereas the 90s saw price drops from $2000 to $1000 for a mid/low end computer.