lambda calculus

Tom Stuart's Ruby Manor 3 talk builds FizzBuzz using nothing but Ruby lambdas, working through Church encodings of numbers, booleans and data structures. It is a hands-on introduction to lambda calculus.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session in which Holly Mesrobian and Marc Brooker explain how AWS Lambda is built, including its sandboxing, isolation and scaling architecture. It covers what happens under the hood when serverless code runs.

Jim Weirich's RubyConf 2012 talk derives the Y combinator step by step, live-coding in Ruby lambdas. It builds up an understanding of functional programming and lambda calculus from first principles.

Philip Wadler's Lambda Days talk on propositions as types, the link between logic and computation that underlies theorem provers and programming language design.

Philip Wadler's Strange Loop talk on Propositions as Types, the link between logic and computation (the Curry-Howard correspondence). He traces its history through Church, Godel and Turing and shows how it shaped theorem provers and programming languages.

Aditya Siram argues that functional programming has much to learn from Smalltalk's interactivity, using Pharo and Squeak to show live, visual, explorable programming environments.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

Jose Valim introduces Nx, the project bringing numerical computing to Elixir, covering multi-dimensional tensors, automatic differentiation and JIT compilation to CPU and GPU.

Erik Meijer argues that category theory is the mathematicians' version of interface-based design. He shows that Java 8 lambdas and method references form a Cartesian closed category.

Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus argue that networked software stays insecure because protocols and inputs are too complex to recognize safely. They propose using formal language theory and grammars to build secure, verifiable input handling.

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

A panel with Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong and Carl Hewitt, hosted by Francesco Cesarini, on the history and future of concurrency. The three creators of CSP, Erlang and the actor model discuss their differing approaches.

Eugenia Cheng gives the opening keynote at Lambda World 2017, presenting category theory as very abstract algebra whose abstraction gives it broad applicability. She applies it to everyday questions including privilege and prejudice.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Herb Sutter revisits basic C++ questions in light of C++11 and C++14: how to declare and initialize variables, pass values to functions, write loops, and use smart pointers. It covers auto, rvalue references, range-for, uniform initialization, lambdas, unique_ptr and shared_ptr.