4 ms·
yeah it's a strange aspect of that lisp era, it was born in mccarthy's recursive functions over recursive lists.. and then interactive development over global s
by agumonkey 3mo ago
yeah it's a strange aspect of that lisp era, it was born in mccarthy's recursive functions over recursive lists.. and then interactive development over global state added as a layer.
i would argue that lispers use of mutability was much more surgical and principled but maybe i'm biased
- dismalaf 3mo agoMcCarthy's pure Lisp existed only on paper. The first Lisp that ran on a computer had mutable variables, as did Lisp 1.5, Maclisp, etc... Immutability requires lots of copying and early computers didn't have much memory to spare...
- agumonkey 3mo agofair point but from memory most of early programs in his paper were purely immutable in nature (tree recursion and substition), right ?
- dismalaf 3mo agoYes but he also wrote this when describing the language: > In addition to the facilities for describing S-functions, there are facilities for using S-functions in programs written as sequences of statements along the lines of FORTRAN (4) or ALGOL (5). These features will not be described in this article
- agumonkey 3mo agohmm funny i completely missed that, i thought these traits were introduced a bit later