I found it extremely confusing.

It sets a challenge as a rhetorical tool, but then completely fails to honour the challenge through the bulk of the explanation.

- don’t use recursion: spends multiple paragraphs implying that a function calling itself isn’t recursion

- don’t use declaration: ignoring that defining arguments to a function is declaration

I’m not saying the article is “wrong”. But I thunk I’d have preferred a plain intro to lambda calculus.

(Writing this as someone who has struggled to learn “real” functional programming the few times I’ve tried over the past 20+ years, but who very much likes using RxJS and the functional flavour of lodash and wishes I could see deeper into that black hole.)

> don’t use recursion: spends multiple paragraphs implying that a function calling itself isn’t recursion

It did the opposite. It wrote many paragraphs of code and threw each one out as soon as recursion showed up.

So it's as confusing as I thought to do it that way. I wasn't sure if I thought so because I'm already familiar with all these concepts or because this introduction is indeed convoluted. Thanks for taking the time to reply!