If you like Caramel, nobody here is going to tell you to use something else. Each to their own.

Agreed, λ-calculus is simple and clean. But what about the machine code being generated? Eventually, each concept in the abstraction has to be translated, often through several layers, to memory locations, register contents and the available instructions. Allowing for cache issues and out of order instruction issue. It is because of these and many other reasons that compilers, such as gcc, have gotten so big and complex.