This is one of those canards that people who've never actually programmed in Algol or old lisps (or who forget what its like!) say. The thing to remember about

This is one of those canards that people who've never actually programmed in Algol or old lisps (or who forget what its like!) say. The thing to remember about Algol 60 is that it does not have nominal types! It only has (fixed) numerical and array types (it didn't even have records!). Nominal typing was invented by Nicholas Wirth and Tony Hoare for their Algol W, and then became real when Wirth released Pascal (it was also present in the Algol 68 spec, though Algol 68 didn't have real compilers until the mid 70s). That's not a small improvement over Algol 60... it was a massive conceptual change. Before 1978, and the lamdba papers, Lisp was a very different language. Lexical scoping (which technically was invented before in ML) was a massive change in how Lisp worked, because it made the functional style of programming possible.