As explained in Kestrels, the practice of nicknaming combinators after birds was established in Raymond Smullyan's amazing book To Mock a Mockingbird. In this book, Smullyan explains combinatory logic and derives a number of important results by presenting the various combinators as songbirds in a forest. Since the publication of the book more than twenty years ago, the names he gave the birds have become standard nicknames for the various combinators.
Holy crap. I own two of Smullyan's books, which I read as a kid, but I never knew this. News.yc pays off again!
Reg, as usual, is making Ruby do some pretty exotic gymnastics, but more than the language extensions themselves, I just really want to read To Mock a Mockingbird now.
