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A comment on What is a functional programming language?. Parent comment

Re:What is a functional programming language? by anc2020 on Thursday July 23, 2009 @07:33PM (#720598)
Lisp was by all accounts an attempt to make a working lambda calculus[1]. However the machines weren't very quick then and speed was a real issue. Even later on when Scheme was designed, speed was an important consideration, and it probably did affect the resulting language.

What the author was saying about TCO was that, based on the fact that all our machines today use stacks, and not wanting to have programs that break(!), any implementations of lambda calculus on these machines must have TCO to allow as much of the lambda calculus as possible to be available in the programming language, lest you reject otherwise correct programs.

But make no mistake, Lisp[2] and functional programming languages ARE based on the lambda calculus. The article really did hit the nail on the head.

--

[1] "Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, based on Alonzo Church's lambda calculus."

-- Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29)

(and lots of other sources agree with this)

[2] Sorry to say it, but Lisp isn't the center of the Universe. It's a cool trick, but it isn't that great.

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Re:What is a functional programming language? by anc2020 on Thursday July 23, 2009 @07:42PM (#720611)
And quite relevant to this topic, our compilers and computers have (since the invention of Lisp and Scheme) gotten hugely better to the point where we can make much closer approximations to the lambda calculus such as the inclusion of lazy evaluation and immutability.
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Re:What is a functional programming language? by bitdiddle on Thursday July 23, 2009 @07:54PM (#720627)
I'm not sure I agree with this first statement. For sure scheme was motivated by lambda calculus, but I do not believe McCarthy (a functional analyst by training) was aware of lambda calculus when he invented Lisp. Rather he was motivated by symbolic calculations often performed in functional analysis.

NOTE: I stand corrected, I just checked and McCarthy's Lisp paper does cite Church's thesis work. Somehow I had thought Algol was motivated by lambda calculus

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Re:What is a functional programming language? by apgwoz on Thursday July 23, 2009 @10:54PM (#720850)
interestingly, I believe scheme was a failed[1] attempt at building OOP

[1] of course a closure is an object with exactly one method, apply

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Re:What is a functional programming language? by silentbicycle on Friday July 24, 2009 @08:30AM (#721315)
No, it was an attempt to implement the Actor model in Lisp. The Actor model isn't what people usually have in mind when someone says OOP - it's more like Erlang or Termite.
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