askingask said:
But like aren't there certain rules, that if you take them out, it looses it's "universality".
Universality needs to be defined. I assume you mean
Turing completeness. But ...
The untyped lambda calculus is Turing-complete, but many typed lambda calculi, including System F, are not.
... so we even need a closer look at which Lambda system you mean! Your question already needs nonbasic considerations!
For example, Wikipedia says
##\lambda##-terms tend to formulate general principles of mathematics rather than denote objects of the usual mathematical universe. For example, ##\lambda x.x## formulates the mapping principle of identical mapping, but this is always related to a given set as the domain of definition. A universal identity as a function is not defined in the set-theoretic formulation of mathematics. The lambda calculus in the strict sense should therefore be seen as a redesign of mathematics in which the basic objects are understood as universal functions, in contrast to axiomatic set theory, whose basic objects are sets.
I wasn't familiar with the Lambda calculus so I looked it up on Wikipedia. What is written there is quite interesting. I suggest to read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus
and
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-Kalkül
The latter can be translated by using Chrome and right-clicking plus the option "Translate to English".
The versions are different so it makes sense to read both. For a rigorous, whereas more sophisticated version see
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/lambda-calculus
All these explanations, however, couldn't answer the question: Why do you bother? You said you wanted an answer on a layman level, but the subject itself leads directly into the rabbit hole of formal languages and / or computer science.
Lambda calculus is a formal language for studying functions. It describes the definition of functions and bound parameters and was introduced in the 1930s by Alonzo Church and Stephen Cole Kleene. Today, it is an important construct for theoretical computer science, higher-order logic, and linguistics.
Lambda calculus is a formal language from a mathematical point of view and rather exotic than common.
Lambda calculus is a computation class from a computer science point of view. Some other concepts ("Konrad Zuse incorporated ideas from the lambda calculus into his
Plankalkül from 1942 to 1946.") and programming languages (Lips, Haskell, ML) use principles of it.
Lambda calculus can be helpful in linguistic, aka semantics.
Semantics is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the meaning of natural language expressions. Formal semantics initially uses simple tools from predicate logic and set theory. These are then extended with the fundamentals of lambda calculus, for example, to represent propositions as properties using lambda abstraction and to represent more complex noun phrases, adjectival phrases, and some verb phrases. The basis is, for example, a model-theoretic semantic interpretation of Richard Montague's intensional logic.
I cannot see how any of these viewpoints can be treated on a basic level. Even its (Lambda calculus's) own history is far from being easily explainable:
Wikipedia said:
In the 1930s, he [Alonzo Church] became known to his mathematical and logic colleagues for a universal formal model for computations, the lambda calculus, which he developed as part of his research into the foundations of mathematics and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Data and operators are embedded in the lambda calculus using Church coding, and natural numbers are represented by Church numerals. In 1936, Church demonstrated that for two given expressions in the lambda calculus, there is no computable function that can decide whether they are equivalent or not, thus, problems that are undecidable using number theory (Church's theorem); two equivalent expressions can be transformed into one another or reduced to the same normal form (Church-Rosser theorem). This inspired his student Alan Turing's reflections on the halting problem of a machine performing arithmetic operations. Church and Turing then discovered that the lambda calculus and the Turing machine are equivalent models for the decision problem; a derived notion of computability is known as the Church-Turing thesis.
In the field of philosophy, he is known for his highly argumentative defense of the Platonic position in the modern Universals Controversy.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonzo_Church#Werk