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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Rhodri James writes:
 > On 18/08/18 01:59, Abe Dillon wrote:
 > > The argument I tried to make is, "yes I believe there are cases where a
 > > less jargon identifier is preferable and that I believe 'lambda' is an
 > > example of a missed opportunity to use a less jargon (maybe 'esoteric' is a
 > > better word here?), more descriptive name."
 > 
 > While I don't entirely disagree with you, if I had been responsible for 
 > inventing that bit of Python I would probably have gone with "lambda" 
 > too.  It had been part of my vocabulary as a computer scientist long 
 > before I met it in a programming language.

I was an economist then, and I'm an economist still, but I met lambda
in 1977.  Surely lambda has had that role in computer languages since
shortly before I was born.  I would guess anybody above a certain age
would reach for "lambda" first for a keyword to denote or define an
anonymous function.  Not because of the lambda calculus, but because
of Lisp.  (OK, that's indirectly because of the lambda calculus.)

Had Guido decided to change it to "def", I suspect he'd be regretting
it slightly today, for reasons similar to the regrets about "range":
we normally only allow omitting positional arguments at the end of the
list.  Maybe there's a better word than "regret".  After all, It's
hard to see how you could prototype range better than "range([START,]
END, [STRIDE])", and the same might be true for "def [NAME] ([ARG0,]
...):".