I am a musician and I like the technology (even wanted to do research on music generation in uni), but I still think the notion that music generation will surpass human capabilities in a few years is naive.

Did he?

I think you’re confusing lambdas with lambda calculus. Lambda calculus is more than just anonymous functions.

To put it extremely simply, let’s just say functional programming (the implementation of lambda calculus) is code with functions as data and without shared mutable state (or side effects).

The first one increases expressiveness tremendously, the second one increases safety and optimization. Of course, you don’t need to write anonymous functions in a functional language if you don’t want to.

As for why those “pseudo-functions” are useful, you’re probably thinking of closures, which capture state from the context they are defined in. That is pretty useful. But it’s not the whole reason lambda calculus exists.

Why does food have to be so varied on a weekly basis? Eating twenty different vegetables every week doesn’t make my life any better than just eating the several few kinds I enjoy and find healthy. Same with meat, but I have great variety monthly when I feel like it, same as with fruits and vegetables. That’s enough for me.

And besides, those 80,000 edible plants just don’t fill you up like those 3 meats do, in taste or substance.

Chicken, pork, beef. Duck is common in Asian cuisines. Turkey is common in Western cuisines. Lamb is super common in many cuisines and my personal favorite meat. Bison burgers are popular in many places (dad loves them and so does my work cafeteria). There are dozens of varieties of seafood - but to be generous let’s say it’s just three groups: shells, scales, crustaceans. That’s already 10 types of ‘meat’ that people eat semi-regularly, not including the different aspects/preparation of those selections. Hardly a lack of options!

I use Helix and Nvim pretty much concurrently and whenever I have to use vim I feel slower on most basic movements. A fresh set of keybinds is really nice - though simultaneously there are one or two specific actions which are slower or unintuitive in Helix. But overall I love Helix.