I'm sorry that I didn't get the chance to reply to your original comment before the downvote brigade chilled your speech. If I recall correctly, your question was an interesting jumping off point for a discussion about the difference between information theoretic "simplicity" and code that is readable and simple to reason about.

Lisp seems to have a sort of almost mystical promise that maybe in some fundamental, mathematical point in conceptspace, the two forms of "simplicity" converge. I think that Lambda calculus, like quantum mechanics, gives the lie to this promise.

The Church numeral for 9 is not a very readable symbol for human beings, but the Church numerals as expressed in binary are more compact than an ASCII or UTF-8 representation of those numerals, and once they've been defined along with a few operations, you get big swaths of number theory stuff "for free".

Disclaimer: just a guy on HN, no credentials

Edit: Also, I starred your eli repository, it looks really interesting!

Hope restored, much appreciated :)