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

[Christopher Subich]

mcherm at gmail.com wrote:
> concept quickly familiar. But "lambda" has a very clear meaning... it's
> a letter of the greek alphabet. The connection between that letter and
> anonymous functions is tenuous at best, and fails the test of making
> Python read like "executable pseudocode".

But 'lambda' does have a very clear meaning in the realm of functional 
programming, and it means precisely (mostly) what it means in Python: an 
anonymous function.

It might not be the -best- possible name, but anyone who's had a 
computer science education should have had a class that introduced basic 
functional programming topics (even if only for academic interest), and 
so they should be familiar with the keyword name.

If not, then it's just a magic word.  Kind of like 'def'.