Using and abusing Ruby for computer science great good

This talks uses ruby to illustrate Church Encoding in the Lambda Calculus. It uses Ruby’s Proc as a substitute for lambda expressions. It is suitable for an audience without a computer science background, but some programming experience is needed to follow along. This talk is heavily indebted to Chapter 6 of Tom Stuart’s excellent Understanding Computation book.

You can find a recording and transcript of the first workshop courtesy of Pusher’s Sessions. Do note that the first workshop suffered from a couple of flaws – notably a poor explanation of the church encoding of lists.

You can also find:

• The code repository with exercises and solutions
• The slides

This talk was originally given at the Sheffield Ruby User Group as a workshop. It was also delivered to the Cambridge Programmers’ Study Group as a talk.