Learning about Church and Scott encoding was much more interesting than I thought it would be. I was expecting it to be tedious and banal, but I came out of it feeling like I had some sort of revelation. Imagining naturals, lists, trees, etc. as function application was mind-bending at first, but it eventually clicks into place. Lambda calculus is so incredible in its combination of simple semantics, expressiveness, and abstraction/compositionality.

To go a step further, think about how you would implement a predecessor function on the Church encoding of the naturals. It is much more complicated than one might expect, and perfectly motivates the introduction of Scott encodings and the fixed-point function.