Achim Schneider continues to comment the Lisp history:
In fact, it wasn't even meant to be a programming language, just a calculus.
There is comprehensive German article (in English), by Herbert Stoyan, on this historical issue: http://www8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/html/lisp/histlit1.html Stoyan reminds a - currently - not so obvious truth, that something like functional paradigmatics was not so popular at that time, the second half of fifties, beginning of sixties. People reasoned rather in terms of algorithms, and McCarthy was no exception. Let's cite Stoyan: "To come back to functional programming, it is an important fact that McCarthy as mathematician was familiar with some formal mathematical languages but did not have a deep, intimate understanding of all their details. McCarthy himself has stressed this fact (23). His aim was to use the mathematical formalismus as languages and not as calculi. This is the root of the historical fact that he never took the Lambda-Calculus conversion rules as a sound basis for LISP implementation." So, I believe it is not so briliant an idea to confound the Church calculus with Lisp! We have also the text of the Master himself, available on-line: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html The chapter on the "prehistory": http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/node2.html#SECTION0002000000 0000000000 begins: "My desire for an algebraic list processing language for artificial intelligence work on the IBM 704 computer arose in the summer of 1956 during the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence which was the first organized study of AI. During this meeting, Newell, Shaw and Simon described IPL 2, a list processing language for Rand Corporation's JOHNNIAC..." So, sorry, but McCarthy since the very beginning thought about making a usable computer language, not a "calculus". When discussing the evolution of FLPL, the *third* point mentions Church for the first time: "c. To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the -notation of Church (1941). I didn't understand the rest of his book, so I wasn't tempted to try to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions. Church used higher order functionals instead of using conditional expressions. ..." See also the article of Paul Graham: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.ps ======= Before somebody once more accuses me of pedantry, or says publicly here that I am aggressive towards people: You know that spreading half-truths, and also plain rubbish on Internet is extremely easy. Wherever you look, you find plenty of occasions to err, it suffices to put yourself in a mode of a dead person from the movie "The sixth sense" of M. Night Shyamalan, with Bruce Willis, and Haley Joel Osment. The boy says to the other main personage (unaware of his own condition) that "dead people see only what they WANT to see"... And somehow the false information spreads easier than the true one. THIS list, which, independently of the freedom to chat about anything, is still targeted at serious comp. sci. problems, and I think that the fact that somebody is young and inexperienced, is not a justification to make false claims, just because this and that had XXX years less than myself in order to read some easily available texts. Of course, anybody may say "dubious truths", I am ashamed of myself, but from time to time I explode. Sorry about this. Jerzy Karczmarczuk