Actually, the history is straight-forward, if you accept Gödel as the final arbiter of mathematical taste. Which his contemporaries did.
ETA: well, it’s straight-forward if you both accept Gödel as the arbiter and believe his claims made after the fact. He claimed that Turing’s paper convinced him, but he also promoted it as the correct foundation. A lot of the history was probably not recorded, since all these people were together in Princeton.
It’s also worth noting that Curry’s combinatory logic predated Church’s λ-calculus by about a decade, and also constitutes a model of universal computation.
It’s really all the same thing in the end anyhow; general recursion (e.g., Curry’s Y combinator) is on some level equivalent to Gödel’s incompleteness and all the other obnoxious Hofstadter-esque self-referential nonsense.
Actually, the history is straight-forward, if you accept Gödel as the final arbiter of mathematical taste. Which his contemporaries did.
ETA: well, it’s straight-forward if you both accept Gödel as the arbiter and believe his claims made after the fact. He claimed that Turing’s paper convinced him, but he also promoted it as the correct foundation. A lot of the history was probably not recorded, since all these people were together in Princeton.
EDIT2: so maybe that is what you said originally.
It’s also worth noting that Curry’s combinatory logic predated Church’s λ-calculus by about a decade, and also constitutes a model of universal computation.
It’s really all the same thing in the end anyhow; general recursion (e.g., Curry’s Y combinator) is on some level equivalent to Gödel’s incompleteness and all the other obnoxious Hofstadter-esque self-referential nonsense.