map/filter/reduce/lambda opinions and background unscientific mini-survey

[Steven Bethard]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> mcherm at gmail.com wrote:
>> So I'd say that it's a pretty obscure name that most people
>> wouldn't know.
> 
> I can't believe that anybody with any computer science
> background doesn't know it.

Perhaps this reflects on the quality of education in the United States 
;) but I managed to get a BS in Computer Science at the University of 
Arizona without ever seeing the word lambda (in the programming 
languages sense).

However, I only took one class in programming languages, and it was more 
of a survey class than a theory class.  When I did take a theory class, 
here at University of Colorado at Boulder, they did, of course, cover 
lambda calculus.  But there was at least a year or two in which I would 
have considered myself somebody "with any computer science background" 
who wasn't familiar with lambda.

OTOH, I fully agree with Peter Hansen: "Really, the name is such a 
trivial, unimportant part of this whole thing that it's hardly worth 
discussing."

STeVe