Re: [Haskell-cafe] David Turner quote on lisp and FP

The 1986 IFIP World Congress was held in Trinity College Dublin in 1986, when I was a young postgrad. John McCarthy was one of the many distinguished speakers that visited at that time. I was writing a "silicon compiler" as a DSL in a strict subset of ML, and was keen to understand these (for me, new/strange) functional languages a little better. So I asked him was the use of the LAMBDA notation in Lisp because the language was functional, or was it just a convenient notation for anonymous functions? His answer was short and very definitive: he said it was a convenient notation - he didn't consider LISP to be a functional language. Cheers, Andrew

On 12 Mar 2015, at 04:57, Rustom Mody wrote:

There is this quote: It needs to be said very firmly that LISP is not a functional language at all. My suspicion is that the success of Lisp set back the development of a properly functional style of programming by at least ten years. David Turner

found here and there on the net eg http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1376090701 http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1376090701

Does anyone have/know the original reference?

Thanks Rusi --

http://blog.languager.org http://blog.languager.org/

_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

Andrew Butterfield School of Computer Science & Statistics Trinity College Dublin 2, Ireland