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

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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