The Y Combinator (no, not that one) – A Crash Course on Lambda Calculus
Has the Y combinator been useful to anything? Has it been used in any software in a role other than pedagogic?It's a beautiful way to make a recursive call without binding the function to an identifier, but has it actually proven useful? It would seem that languages that allow that make it easy to use the Y combinator also typically make it easy to use named recursion with a permanent or a temporary name.