The technique he uses to represent data structures is lambda is called a "Church Encoding" (look it up online). A nice paper on how that may be used even in more common imperative languages: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2012/ecoop2012.pdf (here it's called "Object Algebra).

Also the general idea reminds of this mailing list entry by Joe Armstrong: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...