Concatenative programming sometimes feels like peeking into a mirror world, where function composition became the basic unit instead of function application. Familiar concepts glimmer with new and exciting reflections, and before you know it, it’s four o’clock in the morning, and you’re still struggling with making subtraction work.

Armed with the home-brewed language STCK, we’ll examine how Alonzo might have implemented booleans and numbers, if he had worked with a concatenative languages instead of lambda calculus. On the way we’ll learn about concatenative programming languages, and explore the deep relations between concatenative and functional programming.

You don’t have to know anything about concatenative programming to enjoy this talk, but some familiarity with lambda calculus might help.