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>McCarthy not understanding it is surprising.

I think he is commenting on the subtleties of it.

I think many reading here will say they understand it or have studied it in a course but I am not so sure everyone gets the subtle points. Myself I have always puzzled over the difference between what programmers call LC and what seems to be discussed by Church.

I understand that Turing and Church came up with different approaches to describing the fundamentals of computing. You can see there is a relationship between LC and LISP. My question is how did we get to the von Neumann architecture and CPU instruction sets from either Church or Turing's work ?

Why? Lambda calculus is based on functions. Lisp supports functions. Both use lambda because that's a known notation for functions.

Lambda calculus can be modeled in lisp. But there are millions of things you can build with Lisp that McCarthy might not know or care about.

It is not that hard to begin with.

McCarthy not understanding it at the time