Are we in the worst of all possible worlds?

Good people are constantly being supplanted in favour of the greedy and sociopathic, over and over and over again.

Imagine if Gary Kildall had made the deal with IBM as was supposed to happen, instead of Gates.

http://www.tomrolander.com/GaryKildall/In%20memory%20of%20Gary%20Kildall.htm

Gary Kildall tried to push elegance in software. Imagine sane computing. Imagine if this person had influence over computing that Gates ended up having.

Actually, I can't imagine it, because some other monster would have come along. The demons are everywhere.

The human race is comprised of mostly nasty, selfish monsters. Our being conscious is a mistake and we shouldn't even be here, but that is a topic for another day.

People who try to do good seem to get stopped before they go too far, while the greedy monsters are completely free to run amok.

>>36
I cringe too.

"Lambda calculus" originally had the more down-to-earth name "hat calculus" so the Greek letter is a total red herring, mostly intended to give an air of formalism and complexity to a simple idea.

Most anonymous functions are not "just" lambdas in the sense of lambda calculus. They have other information, like type tags, mutable bindings, or side effects, which have different semantics. There is a pure lambda calculus interpretation there, but it is not the same as what the programmer wrote down in the language.

"Anonymous function" is not the important part: the important part is "function" (or "procedure"). It's like saying "use an integer literal" when they really mean "pass an integer (whether it comes from a literal, variable, function result, or other expression) as a parameter."