[xfeeefeee]

Regarding the knights of the eastern calculus, what is this phrase they are referring to?

> What probably happened is two independent sets of people were inspired by a cool phrase from hacker lore (given LISP’s long-time popularity at MIT, it’s reasonable to suppose that the phrase may have originated here).

[gumby]

It’s a joke about the Knights of the Lambda Calculus, itself a Sussman joke on things like the Knights of Malta or the Knights of Columbus. Even in the SICP days of 6.001 not everyone outside MIT AI & LCS considered lisp or the lambda calculus relevant to the “real world”, whatever that is.