Lambda calculus is an excellent place for beginners to start. What could be easier to learn? It's certainly easier than grokking a Turing machine; and much easier than Haskell: less than a handful of primitives yet can compute anything computable.

There's a category error (in the sense of logic, not algebra) here. Learning a language is not comparable to understanding a program. The concept of lambda calculus is far more subtle than that of Turing machine. But if you know both, a program is likely to be much easier to understand when presented in lambda calculus than when presented as a Turing machine. Doug