Yeah, my comment was a bit snarky. At least CL admits side-effects and non-pure functional programming are necessary. McCarthy obv knew what he wanted to be ab

Yeah, my comment was a bit snarky. At least CL admits side-effects and non-pure functional programming are necessary. McCarthy obv knew what he wanted to be able to express and process, but the LISP he ended up with after the s-expression interpreter was hacked together was like the assembly language he was going to compile m-expressions down to. At the time his main alternative seemed to be FORTRAN. It would be interesting to see if he came up with the same ideas with today's computing landscape and keyboards that had more characters than a card punch. You could argue that many of today's languages incorporate more and more LISP ideas as they evolve but it still might look and work a bit different.