the.com/lambda
a function so anonymous it doesn't even bother with a name.
means a small inline function you define on the spot, used once, and never introduced to your codebase's family.
from borrowed from Alonzo Church's lambda calculus in the 1930s, where he used the greek letter to bind variables in functions; programming languages later stole the symbol and the idea to mean throwaway functions.
church's notationoriginally used a caret, printers substituted lambda
python keywordliterally the word lambda, restricted to one expression
aws twistamazon named serverless functions after it
math ancestorpredates computers by two decades