> Lisp is not, nor has it ever been, a functional programming language. It had lambda decades before other languages figured out it was a good idea, but it had

> Lisp is not, nor has it ever been, a functional programming language. It had lambda decades before other languages figured out it was a good idea, but it had set! for just as long. "Functional programming" used to just mean having first-class functions that you could pass as arguments and return from functions. Lisp has always been functional. It's never been purely functional, which is a different thing - concerning itself with referential transparency rather than first-class functions.