The arbitrary constant was made popular by Douglas Adams in the mid-1970s radio series ``A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy'' (a trilogy in 4 parts) --- however it does have a basis in

The earliest use of 42 in English humour I know of is Lewis Carroll's "Hunting of the Snark", written 1874 when the author was aged 42. Wikipedia says it all, and refers to Martin Gardner's "The Annotated Snark" (which is excellent). Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles Dodgson - a mathematician/logician. Gardner is of course a mathematician/science writer with an interest in puzzles and paradoxes. So although both rather pre-date functional programming, I think we might say there's a similar streak of humour. Sadly, Douglas Adams never revealed what language 'Deep Thought' was programmed in, but perhaps the machine it was 'unworthy to design' was to run Haskell natively? Anthony the standard

model of physics --- a paper in Phys.Rev. of the early 1970s described the unification of the Electro-Weak and Strong nuclear forces --- the arbitrary constant (of nearly) 42 appears in the calculations. I forget the original paper but if you get hold of Frank Close ``The Cosmic Onion'' a graph reproduces the result. I met Douglas Adams once at a book signing and asked him how he got hold of the Phys.Rev. paper so early. Technically he should have written that ``42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything except for gravity and a few other arbitrary constants''

Adams was interested in computing --- I think his reaction to being told about functional programming was to wonder what non-functional programming might be.