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

[Greg Ewing]

Stephan Houben wrote:
> Church's lambda notation was the first way to write 
> down a function without naming it, in the 1930's.

That's debatable. It could be argued that calculus makes use
of anonymous functions, e.g. the expression

    d/dx (x**2 + 2*x - 3)

describes a function of x without giving a name to it.
This means that

> these mathematical developments haven't yet entered high 
> school mathematics

is not entirely true -- anyone who's studied calculus has
been exposed to the concept of an anonymous function, although
it probably hasn't been explicitly described in those terms.

-- 
Greg