Comment by pmarreck
1 year ago
> Most programmers do not know what lambda calculus is
I would frankly be shocked if a 4 year syllabus in CS these days just skipped any mention of Alonzo Church, especially considering that it's fundamental to functional programming and theoretical computer science...
Maybe it's not taught in "CS" programs that are actually just "practical software engineering" bootcamps with extra steps. The real nerds know about lambdas. They're even literally called that in Ruby (and possibly other languages).
FYI: I have a computer science degree. I never learned any functional programming, nor lambda calculus during university. I learned about both topics in my late 30s as a professional.
I find this insane, considering how important I find it now.
Honestly, I didn't take enough CS to get into functional langs, but I did learn what a lambda was. The importance of it all came later, after years of struggling with bugs in million-line codebases that wouldn't have even existed in an immutable, functional language without inheritance.
Your school should lose its accreditation. Your programme is an absolute failure and sounds like they called their software engineering programme computer science
Brace yourself... most programmers don't have a CS degree.
Yes really.
Depends on where they are on the globe.
In many places that won't get them through HR, nor calling oneself Software Engineer is legally allowed without a corresponding degree.
It cannot be
There can't be a more democratized language than Python and in Python closures are defined literally using lambda keyword
I guarantee that 99% of Python programmers just think that's a weird way of saying an anonymous function.
Hell I used lambda functions in C++ for years without knowing what lambda calculus is. And C++ doesn't even use `lambda`.
Sure, but that also means this kind of syntax does not alienate people just because they don't know what lambda calculus is. And they will appreciate it even more when one day they get curious and look up why it is called a lambda