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

[Abe Dillon]

[Greg Ewing]

> If we wanted to be true to the original we should call
> them "caret expressions" and write
>     ^(x, y): x + y
> Nice and quiet!


I actually... kinda like that.

It doesn't really check any of my boxes, but it's better than 'lambda'.

On Thu, Aug 23, 2018 at 12:55 AM Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>
wrote:

> 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
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