3 ms·
You might be confusing Lisp with ML.
by goatlover 4y ago
You might be confusing Lisp with ML.
- coldtea 4y agoNope. ML, albeit ancient, was not even on the map on HN until after Haskell picked mindshare. I mean you could find a post here and a post there, but nothing like Lisp's posts and HN-mindshare. And, sure, HN was from the start a Lisp-built forum, made by a Lisp-advocate, and thus attracting Lispers, but it wasn't that different on the wider internet.
- kazinator 4y agoBut who said more or less of what on HackerNews, and in what years, bears no relevance to what is pure functional language. Lisp had mutable everything from the earliest beginning, and that has been maintained in the descendant dialects. We literally cannot go back to a time in which Lisp was the model of what is purely functional; though it may have been used as an instrument (in restricted ways) for conveying or practically making use of the ideas. There is something called "pure Lisp". Even such backwaters as the Webster Dictionary of Computing seem to know what this is: http://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/Pure+Lisp http://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/Pure+Lisp "A purely functional language derived from Lisp by excluding any feature which causes side-effects." I think you will rarely see an entire program written in nothing but pure Lisp. Functions or modules can be designated as being in pure Lisp. If the documentation says that a certain module is pure Lisp, that instantly sets certain expectations about what it will be like to interact with.