Was Alonzo Church Taoist?

Is there anybody out there?

Presbyterian, I think.

just nod if you can hear me

I’m disappointed; this is as shallow an understanding of Taoism as you’re likely to get. Sure, there is a core religious concept called “Taoism” that can sort of be described as “everything is a zero-sum duality of a producer and a consumer, which returns to nothing in equilibrium”—but in practice, people who are Taoist have a whole bunch of other, much more interesting beliefs.

There’s an instant-classic article waiting to be written, about the usefulness of Taoism (and intertwined concepts like qigong and neidan) as a thought-paradigm for pursuing mastery in modern intellectual crafts like computer programming. (It’s a shame that Robert C. Martin isn’t versed with Taoism; he keeps rubbing up against these ideas tangentially but never colliding with them.)

There’s also a less classic, but highly entertaining article waiting to be written, comparing-and-contrasting computer programming to Taoist martial arts as practiced in Xianxia novels. Abelson and Sussman’s “programmer as wizard” analogy was close, but there’s an even better one.

Others have pointed out the shallow connection to Taoism. But even the discussion of the lambda calculus does not seem to be insightful. For example, recursion in lambda calculus does not need names.