[Python-ideas] Does jargon make learning more difficult?

[Greg Ewing]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> for those who
> know Greek, it's like calling something an "S-expression", which is
> fairly obviously an abbreviation for something. ("Symbolic
> expression", I think? Someone might correct me there.)

Yes, except that lambda is an even more arbitrary choice of
letter -- as far as I know, it doesn't stand for anything.

The story goes that, in his handwritten notes, Church used
something like a caret or circumflex. When his work was
published, the typesetter either misread it as a lambda
or subsituted a lambda because it was the closest thing
he had in his font, and from there on it stuck.

> Abe Dillon <abedillon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>I've also argued that the very form of lambda expressions is noisier than it
>>otherwise needs to be. It's not like noise is only distracting to novice
>>developers.

If we wanted to be true to the original we should call
them "caret expressions" and write

    ^(x, y): x + y

Nice and quiet!

-- 
Greg