The concept certainly predates Haskell by a few decades, but I haven’t found the origin of the phrase.
I tried to find a copy of this SNOBOL paper from 1973[0] to see whether it occurs there, but no luck so far. It doesn’t appear in the original COMIT paper[1].
Re:James Gosling Interview
by darksaints on Thursday August 12, 2021 @09:53AM
(#28156354)
Haskell copied a huge amount of its core concepts from ML, and even then, ML was very much a collection of prior experimental concepts with a new type system on top.
I always it was haskell that introduced the term...