In a nutshell, you could probably reduce it to that.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2786720

> Rather than dumb luck, I think a more meaningful interpretation is that I was a piece of an evolving system, exploring one particular path in a damn hurry. That system contains people playing crucial parts. Academic, business, and personal philosophical and friendship agendas all transmitted an analogue of genes: ideas and concrete inventions from functional programming and Smalltalk-related languages.

Probably. But in these languages, variable declaration is also an lambda/application :

    let x = t1 in t2    <=>    (λx.t2) t1

So, it behaves in a sane way (you have lexical scoping for local variables too). There is no "functional scope".