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Lisp is very old; it started out competing with languages lacking even reentrant function calls. Lisp had a lot of good ideas and a few poor ones from that era.
by erik_seaberg 5y ago
Lisp is very old; it started out competing with languages lacking even reentrant function calls. Lisp had a lot of good ideas and a few poor ones from that era. As compilers improve, it becomes feasible for languages to only provide pure functions, lazy evaluation, and immutable data structures even on the same old imperative CPU cores.
- Jtsummers 5y agoDoes that make Lisp somehow not a functional programming language? That other languages have been developed to provide features that most lisps do not does not remove them from the group of functional programming languages. It just means they're part of a different branch of the same paradigm.
- erik_seaberg 5y agoIt’s pretty easy to write Lisp “functions” that are not actually functions because they invisibly depend on each others’ side effects. The goal of FP is to prevent that.