Add your own abstraction layer:

"The Y combinator allows us to define [1] in computer languages that do not have built-in support for [2], but that do support first-class [3]."

An example:

[1] startups

[2] operating costs

[3] solutions

Your turn!

Richard Gabriel also tried to explain Y:

http://www.dreamsongs.com/NewFiles/WhyOfY.pdf

P.S. This is the best explanation of combinators I've seen on the web (and includes Y of course):

http://users.bigpond.net.au/d.keenan/Lambda/index.htm

Pretty good write up. The only part I did not care for was the pompous: "[...]I think the reason is that he wanted to attract the kind of programmers who were smart enough to have heard about the Y combinator"... The author has confused ignorance with intelligence.

Here is a derivation of the Y Combinator in Perl:

http://use.perl.org/~Aristotle/journal/30896

Ah, a new internet meme. A few years ago, it was Haskell monad tutorials. Now that everyone is hearing about YC, they think they need to learn what the Y combinator is and then blog about it.

Why not just contribute to the Wikipedia article?

Having read Mr. Vanier's musings on programming languages for several years, I highly doubt this situation is as you posit.

Regardless, I'd much rather see the web full of blogs on theoretical computer science than blogs on the lives of "stars" and "fashion models".

I thought the allusion to Y Combinator was about turning a simple operation (program) into a recursive one (business).