Re:Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)
by tunesmith on Thursday February 12, 2015 @01:59PM
(#9040601)
I saw that bit about McCarthy too. I wonder if his point was that while you can do functional programming in lisp, you can do a lot of other non-functional-programming stuff too, and so in that sense he didn't see Lisp as an implementation of lambda calculus.
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Re:Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)
by agumonkey on Thursday February 12, 2015 @08:59PM
(#9042480)
According to D. Gabriel, the imperative forms were added later to seduce scientists used to FORTRAN algorithms. But Steele's interview of McCarthy makes it clear that Lisp is more a natural accident turning into compressed carbon than the implementation of an apriori concept.