On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 6:57 AM, 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

Does anyone have/know the original reference?

As the 10th entry on my version of Google, I found: Michael J C Gordon Programming Language Theory and its Implementation: Applicative and Imperative Paradigms http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.5717&rep=rep1&type=pdf Gordon provides a more complete version of the quote on p. 148: Here , for example, is a quotation by David Turner from the discussion after his paper in the book Mathematical Logic and Programming Languages: It needs to be said very firmly that LISP, at least as represented by the dialects in common use, is not a functional language at all. LISP does have a functional subset, but that is a rather inconvenient programming language and there exists no significant body of programs written in it. Almost all serious programming in LISP makes heavy use of side effects and other referentially opaque features. I think that the historical importance of LISP is that it was the fi rst language to provide ‘garbage- collected’ heap storage. This was a very important step forward. For the development of functional programming , however, I feel that the contribution of LISP has been a negative one. My suspicion is that the success of LISP set back the development of a properly functional style of programming by at least ten years. The cited paper for the quote is: Turner , DA. Functional programs as executable specifications, in Hoare CAR and Shepherdson JC ( eds.) Mathematical Logic and Programming Languages Prentice Hall, 1985. http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/312/1522/363 The quote is the discussion for the paper, found on p. 387. Regards, Sean

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/

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